We must begin with the land

The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) was a significant flowering of political ecology from the 1960s and 1970’s counterculture. It was co-founded in 1974 by its most prominent thinker, Murray Bookchin, and Dan Chodorkoff.

Bookchin wrote extensively about food and agriculture from the early 1950s. In 1962, his first book on pesticides appeared, shortly before Rachel Carson’s more famous Silent Spring on the same topic. As an autoworker brought up in The Bronx district of New York, he was an unlikely green thinker. Yet as he reformulated his Marxist ideas it became apparent to him that the existential threat to the natural environment, now recognised as the ecology crisis, was the major challenge for coming generations. Also, that the ecology and food crises alike, far from being “natural”, had their roots in deep-seated, systemic social causes, of which they were among the most alarming expressions.

Shockingly, world hunger has increased during the past decade, according to the United Nations. Stephen Hunt’s new book We Must Begin with the Land considers the value of many social ecologists’ ideas for understanding historic dominatory agriculture and for addressing the present-day food and ecology crises.