Green Anarchism is an Anarchist school of thought that puts an emphasis on environmental issues. Different form traditional Anarchistic schools, green Anarchist theory extends Anarchist thought beyond human v human interactions to include humans v non-humans. This leads to a revolutionary liberation of both human and non-human; and that aims to bring about an environmentally sustainable Anarchist society.
In addition to Green Anarchism, Anarcho Naturism, Anarcho Primitivism, Eco-Anarchism, Eco-Feminism, Green Syndicalism will also be wrapped up into this writing. All forms of Green Anarchism detail and attempt to change the ways in which People interact with the Environment placing Nature as an overarching ideal above Individuals
Henry David Thoreau. Born July 12 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837 and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. After graduating Harvard the professions open to college graduates at the time were law, the church, business, medicine; All of which did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, he resigned after a few weeks. After Henry and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving.
In other events upon returning to his home in Concord, Thoreau met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years older, took a paternal interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers. Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems, Emerson also urged Henry to begin keeping a journal.
The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."
While back in Concord, Thoreau also began working at his families pencil factory and continued to do so for 13 years; but in March 1845 wanting to focus more on his writing and lacking the ability to concentrate, with the motivation of Ellery Channing (a mutual friend introduced to him by Emerson) told Thoreau...
"Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."
And thus, on July 4, 1845, Thoreau embarked on a 2 year experiment in simple living, moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres that Emerson had bought, 1.5 miles from his family home.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. — Henry David Thoreau
During this time, on July 24 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone paid the tax on his behalf, against Thoreau's wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government", explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Thoreau later revised the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" or "Civil Disobedience".
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage the household. Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden or Life in the Woods in 1854, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. In 1850, he moved into a house at 255 Main Street, where he lived until his death.
Anarchism started to have an ecological view mainly in the writings of American Anarchist and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. In his book Walden he advocates simple living and self-sufficiency among natural surroundings in resistance to the advancement of industrial civilization. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance. Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, in woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Walden compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development. By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles from his family home. Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologic and Anarcho Primitivism, this attitude can be also motivated by certain idea of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism which is the nature of American society in the mid 19th century.
Anarcho Naturism, also referred to as Anarchist Naturism and Naturist Anarchism, appeared in the late 19th century as the union of Anarchist and naturist philosophies. In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the early 1900s, nudism, Anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life. In the 1920s, the inhabitants of the Anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, shocked the conservative residents of the area with their shameless nudity. Mainly, it had importance within individualist Anarchist circles in Spain, France, Portugal, and Cuba. Anarcho Naturism advocates vegetarianism, free love, nudism, hiking and an ecological world view within Anarchist groups and outside them. Anarcho Naturism also promotes an ecological worldview, small Eco-villages, and most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the artificiality of the industrial mass society of modernity. Naturist individualist Anarchists see the individual in their biological, physical and psychological aspects and try to eliminate social determinations.
Anarcho Primitivism is a political ideology that advocates a return to non-"civilized" ways of life through de-industrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies. Anarcho Primitivist critique the origins and progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. According to Anarcho Primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification.
Its the same thing, moving on.
Eco-Feminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyze the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Eco-Feminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of Eco-Feminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including Liberal Eco-Feminism, Spiritual/Cultural Eco-Feminism, and Social/Socialist Eco-Feminism. Interpretations of Eco-Feminism and how it might be applied to social thought include Eco-Feminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Green Syndicalism is a synthesis of Anarcho Syndicalism and Environmentalism, arguing that protection of the environment depends on decentralization, regionalism, direct action, autonomy, pluralism and federation. It largely draws inspiration from the green bans in Australia, the efforts of workers at Lucas Aerospace to convert their factories away from armaments production and Judi Bari's efforts in the IWW to organize timber workers and environmentalists in Northern California. Green syndicalism has been advocated for at various times by Confédération Nationale du Travail, the Confederación General de Trabajadores and the Central Organization of the Workers of Sweden.
Theodore John Kaczynski, born May 22, 1942, also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive life. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the environment. He issued a social critique opposing industrialization and advocating a nature-centered form of Anarchism. Kaczynski's critiques of civilization bear some similarities to Anarcho Primitivism, but Kaczynski rejected and criticized Anarcho Primitivist views.
In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible, resolving to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature. He used terrorism to fight this industrialization, beginning his bombing campaign in 1978. In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require mass organization.
Kaczynski was the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation up to that point. The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) to refer to his case before his identity was known, which resulted in the media naming him the "Unabomber". The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, which appeared in The Washington Post in September 1995. Upon reading the essay, Kaczynski's brother David recognized the prose style and reported his suspicions to the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski—maintaining that he was sane—tried and failed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty. In 1998, a plea bargain was reached under which he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to eight consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.
Animal Rights, Freeganism
Anti-Consumerism, De growth, DIY
Bio-regionalism, Deep Ecology, Neo-Malthusianism
Communalism, Eco-villages
Neo-Luddite, Radical Environmentalism