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Some forty-five years ago, as ecological science was just coming into its own, many thoughtful writers began to wonder whether there was something inherently subversive about thinking ecologically. Murray Bookchin, the founding philosopher of social ecology, responded with a resounding “Yes,” arguing back in the mid-1960s that there is indeed something fundamentally revolutionary and transformative about an ecological understanding of the world. One of my own most important and inspiring teachers, he became a pioneering advocate for sustainable technologies, decentralized cities with politically empowered neighborhoods, a moral economy—freed from the built-in constraints and inequities of the competitive market—and, ultimately, a thorough recasting of modern humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature.* Many of us who were environmental and social activists gained considerable inspiration from this outlook, especially as movements arose from the grassroots during the late 1970s and early 1980s to end the first wave of nuclear power development in the United States. We organized ourselves into small, local “affinity groups” to develop regional antinuclear organizations from the bottom up, and also explored how an energy system that relies on the sun and wind could become the underpinning for a radically decentralized and directly democratic society. Those experiments in merging environmental opposition with a strong, reconstructive vision of a new society offer essential lessons for us today.

Today, it is clearer than ever that the obstacles to a free and sustainable society are social and political, not mainly technological. New ways to save energy and replace fossil fuels are invented and announced almost daily, and the means readily exist for virtually everyone to live a rich and satisfying life. Our established political institutions, however, continue to postpone these needed changes, and the portent of a future of deprivation and scarcity often looms large, defying all our well-fed hopes for a different outlook. Then along comes one of those exceptionally bright days that simply defy all the doom and gloom. They come most often in the Spring, but can arrive in any season. On those days, it is not merely necessary to act on the belief that we can help create a different kind of world—it actually appears to be within our grasp.

Brian Tokar is an activist and author, director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology, and a lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale; edited two books on the politics of biotechnology, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders; and co-edited the forthcoming collection, Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). Tokar has been acclaimed as a leading critical voice for ecological activism since the 1980s and lectures widely on environmental issues and popular movements.

* See, for example, World Resources Institute, Synthesis: Ecosystems and Human Well-Being, A Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II Report, “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” 2007, available from http://www.ipcc.ch; Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, United Nations Development Program, 2007.

* Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for Taste, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 51.

* For an overview of the works of Murray Bookchin, see Janet Biehl, ed., The Murray Bookchin Reader (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999); also his The Limits of the City (Revised edition, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982, currently available from AK Press in San Francisco), and “Market Economy or Moral Economy,” in Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,