Ecology’s anarchist roots challenge today’s green politics

ecology as – Across more than a century of writing and action, anarchists kept returning to the same idea: emancipation and environmental survival are inseparable. From Élisée Reclus’s political ecology avant la lettre to Peter Kropotkin’s insistence on cooperation, from a

When the word “ecology” slides from street language into state documents and corporate slogans, something essential can quietly get lost. The urgency. in this telling. isn’t the need for more facts about nature—it’s the need to re-examine the traditions that treated nature-and-society as a single political question. not a matter of management.

Anarchism sits inside that argument like an overlooked cornerstone. From the earliest formulations of anarchist thought in the nineteenth century. it links human emancipation with environmental preservation as two dimensions of the same societal project. What anarchists offer. the piece insists. is a way to think about ecology without top-down conservation—ecology as a founding practice of cohabitation. where power. ways of inhabiting the world. and the legitimacy of authority are worked out in real social life.

The idea didn’t arrive fully formed. In the early stages of Europe’s industrial revolution. radical criticisms began to surface about the effects of industrial civilisation on both the environment and human beings. Utopian socialist Charles Fourier was quick to critique capitalism’s ravages on nature. Yet dominant socialist lines of thought—particularly Marxism—“did not dwell on ecological issues. ” leaving a gap anarchists tried to fill.

Élisée Reclus, a French geographer exiled as a Communard, developed geography and anarchism as inseparable. He authored the monumental Nouvelle géographie universelle (1875–1894) — published in English as The Universal Geography — and L’Homme et la Terre (1905–1908). For Reclus, understanding human societies meant understanding how they fit into their natural environment. That conviction led him to develop “mesology,” a concept that takes account of the settings in which different organisms interact.

His magnum opus. L’Homme et la Terre. is described as one of the first political ecologies before the term existed. Reclus already saw the ravages of industrial agriculture and capitalism on environmental balances. He wrote that the quality of human life depends on societal choices regarding the earth. and he put it bluntly in a passage where “the truly civilised man” repairs damage. helps the earth rather than attacking it. and takes responsibility for the harmony and beauty of nature.

Reclus’s vision wasn’t just about land use. The text ties it to an ideal of social justice and to an awareness of interconnected domination. He was also said to be a vegetarian and a feminist—traits later picked up and re-read by libertarian ecologists of the 1970s, who saw him as a forerunner.

Around the same era. Peter Kropotkin—described as a Russian prince turned anarchist (1842–1921)—was developing a naturalistic approach to social theory. Like Reclus, he was trained as a geographer and had explored Siberia. In 1902, he published Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, a popular science work that opposed Social Darwinism. Kropotkin argued that cooperation and mutual aid were natural laws as fundamental as competition. In his view. spontaneous cooperation in nature provided an empirical foundation for anarchism: if mutual assistance shapes evolution. then libertarian social structures founded on voluntary association and mutual aid are not only moral. but in accordance with human nature.

Kropotkin didn’t stop at importing “natural laws” into social life. He also critiqued nineteenth-century industrial centralisation. In Fields. Factories and Workshops (1899). he suggested decentralising production by combining agriculture and industry at the local level. aiming to reduce the waste and alienation tied to large-scale capitalist industry. The text credits him with advocating a society made up of autonomous communities that satisfy their needs sustainably—integrating agricultural and manufacturing work. and returning to local short supply chains.

Together. Reclus and Kropotkin are presented as figureheads of a tradition that. unlike other socialist schools from the mid-nineteenth century. integrated ecology into a revolutionary perspective. Their focus, the piece says, was on practical interdependencies. Nature wasn’t a “trove of resources” to be exploited. but a set of human habitats integral to how societies work. Instead of an anthropocentric drive to dominate nature through reason. anarchists advanced “an ethics of cohabitation. ” with politics rooted in ecosystems themselves.

That ethical choice came bundled with a politics of refusal. Their radical rejection of the state—as a hierarchical structure of seizure. standardisation and separation—was linked to an early critique of modern land management. authoritarian planning. and government. The state, they believed, was a rapacious power that destroyed organic forms of human society and relationships to surroundings. From there. the text moves to “ecological federalism”: communities adapting to local ecological conditions rather than an administrative universalism that ignores the diversity of environments.

Even technology entered the debate differently. Rather than a Promethean fascination with mechanisation. the anarchists’ attitude was shaped by direct experience of worker alienation and artisan dispossession. By railing against all-out productivism. they distinguished themselves from mainstream socialist strands that. in varying degrees. conflated liberation with indefinite growth.

Their alternative was described as valuing a frugal lifestyle, technological autonomy, and self-sustainability uncoupled from a quantitative obsession with growth. The text also argues that anarchists’ relationship to science differed from technocratic instrumentalism found in some strains of Marxism: instead of relying on a single foundational body of knowledge. they favoured a “vernacular epistemology. ” including practical know-how and sensory understanding. rejecting academic science’s claim to a cognitive monopoly.

History, too, refused a straight line. The text says anarchists rejected linear historical materialism, where progress of productive forces drives historical development. Instead, history for anarchists was full of forks in the road, about-turns, and situations where old and new coexist. That refusal of teleological time is described as opening the possibility of an ecological conception of time—sensitive to cycles. rhythms. and regenerations.

By the 1890s to the 1910s, activists were pushing changes in daily life away from industrial capitalism—“return to the land, nudity, healthy eating, etc.” The movement was called anarcho-naturism and gained popularity among individualist anarchists during the Belle Époque.

In France, libertarians known as “les naturiens” coalesced around publications such as Le Naturien. The theorists named here—Henri Zisly and Georges Butaud—urged “deserting industrialism” and a radical return to the natural wild. They rejected bourgeois conventions. enthused about life in small rural communities. vegetarianism and nudity. and denounced the modern city as artificial and corrupting.

In Spain, anarcho-naturalism is described as central to the libertarian movement in the 1920s and 1930s. At the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Zaragoza in 1936. just before the Spanish Revolution. delegates discussed the status of naturist communities in future society. The text says the CNT planned to allow vegetarians and nudists among Andalusian anarchist peasants to live outside industrialisation and negotiate specific economic agreements with them. It also describes those peasants as having deep knowledge of local environments—knowledge they sought to preserve while improving communal productivity. rejecting brutal methods of capitalist agroindustry.

In Mexico. libertarians such as Ricardo Flores Magón linked the fight for Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty. ” a popular slogan and the title of his 1916 play) to protecting communal indigenous land from capitalist exploitation. In Argentina and Brazil, anarchists took part in peasant demonstrations against excessive deforestation and land-grabbing by foreign companies.

The argument being made is that peasant, vernacular, and insurrectionary ecology wasn’t nostalgic defence of old ways. It was political innovation: self-management of land. pooling resources. and reclaiming agricultural know-how—part of a broader ecological reshaping of social life. As anarchists confronted the ravages of capitalism and the exodus from the countryside. the ecological question moved into town and city structures. As town planning emerged, their rejection of domination was tied to reflections on spatial forms of liberty.

Then came a different set of warning signs. From the 1950s onwards, the text points to chemical pollution, runaway urbanisation, nuclear threat, and more. In 1962. the American writer Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. denounced by the account as a bestseller that targeted the destruction pesticides wrought on nature. That same year, Murray Bookchin—an American militant anarchist—published Our Synthetic Environment under a pseudonym. It attracted less attention but offered a radical critique of industrial pollution and capitalist productivism.

Bookchin. described here as a worker turned teacher. is credited as among the first to formulate a comprehensive ecological critique from a revolutionary perspective. In a 1964 article titled “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought. ” the piece says Bookchin stated that ecological critique must be integral to social critique: humanity’s survival required a revolution to abolish not only capitalism. but also humanity’s domination of nature.

His key idea. developed in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) and other works. is presented as grounding the ecological crisis in hierarchical and authoritarian structures. The text quotes Bookchin’s claim that “‘what literally defines social ecology as “social” is its recognition of the often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems.’” It follows with the plain implication that domination over nature follows domination of humans over other humans.

To rebalance human life with surroundings. Bookchin envisaged a society structured by cooperation between natural communities—communities not delineated by the state or coercive political authority. That would be achieved through libertarian municipalism: citizens of a community controlling economic production to meet basic needs while preserving the environment.

Other thinkers, the piece says, focused on regions. It names Peter Berg. who coined the term “bioregionalism.” It describes this as shared across libertarian thinkers engaging in political ecology—Jacques Ellul. Bernard Charbonneau. Ivan Illich. and others. The goal, according to the text, was to build decentralised, self-administering, self-governing societies on a human scale. Rather than a sudden dramatic revolution. they wanted to establish a parallel structure of small. self-managing groups brought together on an affinity model.

The 1972 publication of The Limits of Growth is described as leading to a degrowth movement with strong libertarian underpinnings. In the French context, André Gorz is singled out for a radical critique of the society of work and consumption. Gorz advocated individual autonomy as self-determination of a sufficient standard of living. opposing the appropriation of the ecological emergency by the state or companies that would increase technocratic and capitalist domination.

The text then points to Serge Latouche and Paul Ariès as figures advocating re-localisation, direct municipal democracy, and abolition of consumer society—positions close to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism or Kropotkin’s communalism.

In the 1960s and 1970s. the article describes social experiments combining libertarian ideals and ecological issues through rural intentional communities such as Longo Maï in France and self-managing urban projects. These collectives rejected private property. settled on land where they practiced organic agriculture. developed sustainable artisanal technologies. and lived outside capitalist systems.

It also notes that local environmental battles—especially over the Larzac—helped forge alliances between farmers. ecologists. and libertarians. involving radically democratic forms of civil disobedience. This transnational dynamic. the text says. sketched “the rudiments of a practical eco-anarchism. ” anchored in land. defying state control. and inventing eco-technological non-hierarchical forms of collective living.

By the 2010s, the article describes zones à défendre—ZADs. The most famous was in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes from 2009 to 2018. where wooded wetlands were occupied to prevent the construction of an airport. Within an alternative microsociety of around fifty dwellings spread over 1. 600 hectares. inhabitants organised themselves into horizontal communities of about a dozen people. Each established comprehensive self-management of the territory they occupied: decision-making general assemblies. temporary dwellings. collective farms. bakeries. and freely accessible workshops.

Many viewed the ZAD as an enduring experiment in self-sufficient anti-capitalist society. emphasising collectivity. voluntary simplicity. and care for the earth. The text adds that ZADs also took root in Sivens—against a planned dam—and Bure—against a nuclear waste storage depot—and elsewhere. Each occupation. it says. illustrated the intersection of ecological struggle. such as preserving wetlands and forests. with an anarchist project of inventing ways of living without the state or private property.

Even so, the ZADs were controversial within the anarchist movement, just as nineteenth-century free communities were sometimes contested. The piece puts the core debate plainly: whether it was realistic to seek to create spaces inside territory that remains under state control. or whether attention should shift toward more comprehensive strategies to subvert capitalism. It says similar debates appear throughout the ecologist movement. and it connects that to the foundation of Extinction Rebellion in 2018. with anarchist tracts advocating a break away from the state and the economic system in favour of local. self-managed solutions.

The collective Les Soulèvements de la Terre (SLT) is described as moving in a different direction. with a horizontal and protean organisation inspired by libertarianism. The text states it was created in 2021 and became a household name in France after a widely reported demonstration in Sainte-Soline in March 2023. The SLT campaigns bring together anarchist militants and ecologists. forming common cause with local social struggles while seeking to disarm those responsible for the ecological catastrophe. It says the collective practices direct action and civil disobedience—occupation. sabotage. etc.—and has hundreds of local committees. each active in society with support of trade unions. political parties. and environmental associations.

The article closes the loop to contemporary stakes by pointing to other “testing grounds” for the eco-anarchist ideal. One notable example is described in Syrian Kurdistan. In 2012, the Kurdish population began putting in place a democratic confederalist system explicitly inspired by the ideas of Murray Bookchin. The autonomous cantons of Rojava, the piece says, have local assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, and egalitarian people’s militias. Their goal is to establish a feminist, ecological, and democratic society without a nation-state, in extreme conditions.

Despite war and blockades. the text says Rojava has begun reforestation. permaculture. and environmental education programmes. and implemented measures to reduce dependence on oil. It adds that it has created agricultural cooperatives, communal nature reserves, and renewable energy projects—all managed by grassroots communes.

Living without dominating is offered as the through-line that ties classical Marxist subordination of ecology to productive forces. and liberal naturalisation of resource exploitation in the name of progress. to a libertarian counter-vision. The account credits libertarian thinkers with constructing an integrated critique of social domination and domination over nature. describing an ecopolitical vision of autonomy: social justice. rootedness. an ecosystem-wide focus. and horizontal institutions.

Yet it insists anarchism and ecology can’t be reduced to a stable synthesis or treated like a simple thematic add-on. Their meeting place is characterised as a locus of tension where political thought’s questions keep reappearing: what is a habitable world. how legitimate is authority. and what structures are fair and just for whole ecosystems and enable living beings to live alongside one another.

In that sense. anarchism’s advantage is described as coming from its tight link with ecology. preventing those questions from being answered with standard categories of modern politics. Baptiste Morizot is quoted: “‘it is quite another matter: it is the call of the interdependences which indicate the limits to the range of possibilities that the human democratic collective can explore.’”.

The text ends with a warning that sovereignty, law, and contracts are inadequate tools for the entire natural world. It calls for re-politicising materiality—treating it not merely as a constraint. but as an ontological framework in which human institutions are one modulation among others. From there, it frames anarchism as particularly suited to thinking about ecological normativity because power is treated as contingent. The goal is not to base norms on nature in an authoritarian way. nor to construct another green doctrine. but to make ecology a pragmatics of the communal and of sufficiency.

In the final movement, the piece returns to emancipation. Freedom, it says, isn’t something taken from the world—it’s something that becomes part of it, allowing unique forms of life to coexist in the long term without dominating one another.

anarchism ecology political ecology Élisée Reclus Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Mikhail Bakunin Peter Kropotkin Murray Bookchin libertarian municipalism bioregionalism degrowth ZADs Notre-Dame-des-Landes Sainte-Soline Les Soulèvements de la Terre Rojava democratic confederalism Carson Silent Spring Our Synthetic Environment Larzac Sivens Bure