Harbinger: a Journal of Social Ecology

Vol. 4, Issue #2Winter 2022/2023

Editorial: Social Ecology and the New Abolitionism

Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin

The Politics of Nature from Left to Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity

The Walled Commons to the Picket Fence: Racism as an Ecological Force in Mid-Twentieth Century America

Individualized Medicine as Racial Eugenics: A Critical Appraisal

Decolonizing Nature: How “Wilderness” Dispossesses Indigenous People

From the Homestead Act to YouTube: Settler Colonial Continuities of the Homesteading Movement

Blackness and Democratic Modernity

Unsettling, Rooting, and Shifting: Growing Pains for the Bottom-up Confederal Democracy Movement in North American Racial-Settler Context

Editorial: Social Ecology and the New Abolitionism

“Our contention in assembling this issue is both that the ideas of social ecology have important—even necessary—insights for militant movements against racism and that social ecology as a body of revolutionary thought stands to develop itself much further through a deeper engagement with the ideas animating anti-colonial, anti-racist struggles.”

Social Ecology, Racism, Colonialism, and Identity: Assessing the Work of Murray Bookchin

“A central task for social ecological theory is to incorporate what is useful in the historical and theoretical scholarship that Bookchin…neglected, without also smuggling in the problematic political assumptions that he correctly warned of.”

The Politics of Nature from Left to Right: Radicals, Reactionaries, and Ecological Responses to Modernity

“All varieties of environmentalism eventually sort out, implicitly or explicitly, what they draw from the left and from the right as well as the emergent space between those poles.”

The Walled Commons to the Picket Fence: Racism as an Ecological Force in Mid-Twentieth Century America

“The forces of racism and its profiteers therefore carried out the systematic destruction of American cities and brought the built environment of human habitation into a collision course with both local ecosystems and global biospheric stability. The result was a society that is almost uniquely anti-ecological in human history.”

Individualized Medicine as Racial Eugenics: A Critical Appraisal

“This racialized and hierarchical neo-eugenics program is also a danger to the future of our species: if allowed to proceed, its underlying circular and biased reasoning will actively deplete human genetic diversity and risk bringing us to extinction.”

Decolonizing Nature: How “Wilderness” Dispossesses Indigenous People

“In retrospect, it is clear that killing and displacing Indigenous groups which lived in a mutually beneficial relationship with their environment for tens of thousands of years and replacing them with a civilization that has brought Earth to the brink of eco-apocalypse in the span of two centuries was not the best strategy for protecting the environment.”

From the Homestead Act to YouTube: Settler Colonial Continuities of the Homesteading Movement

“The homesteader fantasy of living outside of the capitalist system is in fact impossible; it rests on the benefits of Indigenous land dispossession, racist implementation of land policies, and ongoing state subsidies to homesteaders. This contradiction makes it a movement that depends on capitalism without challenging or even acknowledging its existence.”

Blackness and Democratic Modernity

“A nation-state simply is not an adequate vessel for Black self-determination—such a ‘Black state’ would be a stricture upon that self-determination, not its expression.”

Unsettling, Rooting, and Shifting: Growing Pains for the Bottom-up Confederal Democracy Movement in North American Racial-Settler Context

“The unsettling process entails unpacking and contextualizing the Euro-centric ideas and practices that have been presumptively universalized across non-European contexts. Unsettling can extend deeply to implicit and explicit Eurocentric presumptions about patriarchy, heterosexuality, the primacy of class analysis, the nature of the state, and more.”

Forms of Freedom: Dual Power in Fiji

Dual power movements can learn from the iTakukei people’s indigenous forms of direct democracy in post-colonial Fiji.

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Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology seeks to publish rigorous inquiry guided by emancipatory political goals. As social ecology is a broad and interdisciplinary field, we’re open to a variety of formats and topics, including but not limited to theoretical and philosophical texts, strategic reflections on current organizing projects, artistic contributions, book/film/tv/performance reviews, and essays interrogating a wide spectrum of relevant topics.