I received this letter from Gary Edelman:
Don’t know if you caught the obit in the New York Times about the passing of Murray Bookchin. Strangely enough the obit in the Times treats old Murray pretty well.
The point they only briefly touch upon, is that if “community” means anything in terms of importance in the process of community planning, city planning, architecture and social justice building, we all owe an enormous debt to Bookchin and his work and that of all his pen names.
Bookchin was the first person to really look at the entire planet as a community. He wrote Our Synthetic Environment a year before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Basically, her macro scale arguments plagerized Bookchin’s ideas.
Even before his book, Our Synthetic Environment, in fact, 10 years before the book, Bookchin published an article called “The Problems of Chemicals in Food”, which is really what Carson’s Silent Spring is about.
Again, we owe him, and probably Hans Jonas, for being the two philosophers that made “Green Politics” possible(Jonas though an American citizen by then, was really the intellectual behind the European Greens- and Bookchin here in the US)
Bookchin was an acquaintence. I can vividly remember him during a TV show in New York City on building community, trying to figure out how to save NYC saying, “Community, Community, what we need is more community”. Bookchin probably understood that term best.
Edelman’s remarks inspired me to buy Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, when I discovered it for sale at the new Infoshop opened up on Fratney and Clark by the Cream City Collective. And Bookchin has inspired me to read Hesiod’s Works and Days.“ He called it "a peasant Illiad of the seventh century before Christ…For the first time in a written legacy, work—in contrast to valor—appears as an attribute of personal nobility and responsibility.”
I was also inspired to look up the story of Cockaigne*, which Bookchin suggested may be a better vision of paradise than the rather abstract visions I was raised with back in the late 1940s and l950s.
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*Cockaigne or Cockayne is a land of plenty in medieval myth, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist.
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