Harbinger: a Journal of Social Ecology

Vol. 4, Issue #3 Summer 2024

Editorial: Heresies and Sacred Cows

Prosperity, Urbanity, and Ecological Consciousness

Heretical Resonances: Historicizing Social Ecology in the Neoliberal Epoch

Social Ecology After the Collapse of Western Hegemony

From Ambivalence to Profanity: Resisting the Dogmatic Ideal of Community

Agency in Eugenics Thinking

Second Nature Beyond the Human

Always Swimming Upstream: My Social Ecology Journey

In Conversation on Dialectical Naturalism

Editorial: Heresies and Sacred Cows

This issue of Harbinger is dedicated to exploring what might be called social ecology “heresies” – new perspectives that critique, challenge, or rethink its prevailing “orthodoxies” and take aim at some of our political community’s sacred cows.

Prosperity, Urbanity, and Ecological Consciousness

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest—ranging from southern Canada to northern California—have long had…

Heretical Resonances: Historicizing Social Ecology in the Neoliberal Epoch

Murray Bookchin was keenly aware of the unique constraints, as well as possibilities, imposed by…

Social Ecology After the Collapse of Western Hegemony

The 1960s saw the development of the struggles of various social groups as well as…

From Ambivalence to Profanity: Resisting the Dogmatic Ideal of Community

Calls for radical community-based action in response to the climate crisis seem to grow louder…

Agency in Eugenics Thinking

Armed with its twisted philosophy of history and mystical sensibility, the very idea of eugenics…

Second Nature Beyond the Human

This essay is the first of a planned three-part series delving into the science of…

Always Swimming Upstream: My Social Ecology Journey

When my teacher Pamela Boyce Simms gave a presentation at the 2017 ISE Summer Gathering…

In Conversation on Dialectical Naturalism

Murray Bookchin’s ideas on dialectical naturalism have sparked significant debate among ecophilosophers, even within social…

Issue #2

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.”

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 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.”

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Issue #1

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.