Bookchin v. 'lifesyle anarchism"

[Gordon Fitch]

Chuck Grimes:
> ... 
> What makes Thoreau and Melville important to me, is the centrality of
> nature in their work. But this core which is also what invigorates
> Transcendentalism is still alive and well in the whole ecology
> movement, the numerous national and international groups and their
> litanies of protest against corporate globalization and US
> hegemony---the erasure of local cultures and communities, the
> senseless development and exploitation of every resource, the burning
> of forests for live stock grazing, the industrialization of the
> ocean's fisheries, and so on and so forth. 

Nature is a different thing to Thoreau and Melville than it
is to the ecology movement.  To the former, it was a
mighty force, a mother and a teacher; to the latter, it's a
political victim.  In a sense, as Bruce McKibben noted in an
essay famous long ago, it has come to an end.  Mankind has
grown up and as a primary act of mankindhood "he" has killed
not his father but his mother.  The only other survivors,
really, seem to be the bacteria, who I understand are making
a big comeback, and may yet wreak the ending of _The_War_Of_
_The_Worlds_ upon us; and the nature inside us, human nature
if any, which may have begun to reveal itself in the 20th
century as the worst enemy of humanity, even worse than
the bacteria.

Though I admire the hopeless gallantry with which flowers and
more sober weeds push up along the sides of the freeway before
the mowers come for them.  Though besmirched and dismembered 
and certainly no match for the machines, the ancient mother
still tries to reknit the Edenic paradise "even to the edge of 
doom".


>                                     The long list of reactions
> to those atrocities has little to do with American individualism,
> ...

Well, I wouldn't say that -- American individualism has
provided many of the atrocities, not that there weren't
others lined up to take a shot if it missed.