Chapter 1 - The Ecological Alternative

Summary

“The Ecological Alternative” examines the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the American New Left and its environmentalist affiliates. The chapter also considers how literary representations of this alliance dramatize its contradictions. Many student radicals, especially those receptive to Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, sought to structure alternative social arrangements that would liberate the individual psyche, the institutions that repressed it, and the environment itself. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, framed the self prized so highly by student radicals as yet another repression – one that obscured the reality of ecological interconnection. Edward Abbey, especially, documented this subjective confusion in Desert Solitaire (1968). Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established a representational tension between self and ecosystem that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.