A frequent criticism of anarchism is that it is an ideology that fits a world of isolated villages, small enough to be self-governing entities, but not the global, multi-national society that we all inhabit in real life. But in fact the major anarchist thinkers of the past: Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, had a federalist agenda that was a foretaste of modern debates on European unity.

That minority of children in any European country who were given the opportunity of studying the history of Europe as well as that of their own nations learned that there were two great events in the 19th century: the unification of Germany, achieved by Bismarck and the Emperor Wilhelm I; and the unification of Italy, won by Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Vittorio Emanuale II. These triumphs had been welcomed by the whole world (which in those days meant the European world) because Germany and Italy had left behind all those silly little principalities, republics, papal provinces, and city states, to become nation states, empires, and, of course, conquerors.

They had become like France, whose little local despots were finally unified by force, first by Louis XIV with his majestic slogan ‘L’État c’est moi’, and then by Napoleon, heir to the Grande Revolution, just like Stalin in the 20th century, who built up the administrative machinery of terror to ensure that the slogan was true. Or they had become like England, whose kings (and its one republican ruler, Oliver Cromwell) had conquered the Welsh, Scots, and Irish, and sought to dominate the rest of the world outside Europe. The same thing was happening at the other end of Europe. Ivan IV, appropriately named ‘The Terrible’, conquered central Asia as far as the Pacific, and Peter I, known as ‘The Great’, using the techniques he had learned in France and Britain, took over the Baltic, most of Poland, and the west of Ukraine.

Advanced opinion throughout Europe welcomed Germany and Italy to the gentleman’s club of national and imperial powers. The eventual results in the 20th century were appalling adventures in conquest, with the devastating loss of life among young men from the villages of Europe in the two world wars, and the rise of populist demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini, as well as their endless imitators to this day, who claim L’État c’est moi. Consequently, although we have had all too few politicians arguing for the breakdown of nations, we have a host of them of every persuasion who have sought European unity: economic, social, administrative, or, of course, political.

Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we have a multitude of administrators in Brussels issuing edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds, or what constituents of beefburgers or ice cream, may be sold in the shops of member nations. The newspapers joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in Strasbourg from people of every political hue, claiming the existence of a ‘Europe of the Regions’, and daring to argue that the nation state was a phenomenon of the 16th to 19th centuries, which will not have any useful future in the 21st century. The forthcoming pattern of administration in the federated Europe that they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia, or Saxony, as regions, rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally, which has been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the center of gravity is elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the 19th century there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging the alternative of federalism. It is interesting, at least, that those whose names survive were the three best-known anarchist thinkers of that century. The political Left as it evolved in the 20th century has dismissed their legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the Left, since the debate is now monopolized by the political Right, which has its own agenda in opposing both federalism and regionalism.

First among these anarchist precursors was Proudhon, who devoted two of his books to the idea of federation in opposition to that of the nation state. They were La Fédération et l’Unité en Italie of 1862, and in the following year his Du Principe Fédératif. Proudhon was French, a citizen of a unified, centralized nation state, with the result that he was obliged to become a refugee in Belgium. And he feared the unification of Italy on several different levels. In his book De la Justice of 1858, he had forecast that the creation of the German Empire would bring only trouble both to the Germans and to the rest of Europe, and he pursued this argument into the political history of Italy.

On the bottom level was history, where natural factors like geology and climate had shaped local customs and attitudes. ‘Italy’, he claimed,

is federal by the constitution of her territory; by the diversity of her inhabitants; in the nature of her genius; in her mores; in her history. She is federal in all her being and has been since all eternity . . . And by federation you will make her as many times free as you give her independent states.

It was therefore unnatural for Italy to become a nation state.

He understood that Cavour and Napoleon III had agreed to make a federal Italy, but he knew they would rely on a vainglorious princeling from the House of Savoy who would settle for nothing less than a centralized constitutional monarchy. And beyond this, he profoundly mistrusted the liberal anti-clericalism of Mazzini, not through any love of the Papacy but because he recognized that Mazzini’s slogan ‘Dio e popolo’ could be exploited by any demagogue who could seize the machinery of a centralized state. He saw that the existence of this administrative machinery was an absolute threat to personal and local liberty. Proudhon was almost alone among 19th-century political theorists to perceive this:

Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become the formidable engine of a usurping despot. It is a perpetual temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people’s liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future. Centralization might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the profit of its government . . .

Everything we now know about the 20th-century history of Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa supports this perception. Nor does the North American style of federalism, so lovingly conceived by Thomas Jefferson and his friends, guarantee the removal of this threat. One of Proudhon’s English biographers, Edward Hyams, comments that

it has become apparent since the Second World War that United States Presidents can and do make use of the Federal administrative machine in a way which makes a mockery of democracy.

And his Canadian translator Richard Vernon paraphrases Proudhon’s conclusion thus:

Solicit men’s views in the mass, and they will return stupid, fickle and violent answers; solicit their views as members of definite groups with real solidarity and a distinctive character, and their answers will be responsible and wise. Expose them to the political ‘language’ of mass democracy, which represents ‘the people’ as unitary and undivided, and minorities as traitors, and they will give birth to tyranny; expose them to the political language of federalism, in which the people figures as a diversified aggregate of real associations, and they will resist tyranny to the end.

This observation reveals a profound understanding of the psychology of politics. Proudhon was extrapolating from the evolution of the Swiss Confederation, but Europe has other examples in a whole series of specialist fields. The Netherlands has a reputation for its mild or lenient penal policy. The official explanation of this is the replacement in 1886 of the Code Napoleon by ‘a genuine Dutch criminal code’ based upon cultural traditions like ‘the well-known Dutch ‘‘tolerance’’ and tendency to accept deviant minorities’. I am quoting the Netherlands criminologist Dr Willem de Haan, who cites the explanation that Dutch society

has traditionally been based upon religious, political and ideological rather than class lines. The important denominational groupings created their own social institutions in all major public spheres. This process . . . is responsible for transforming a pragmatic, tolerant general attitude into an absolute social must.

In other words it is diversity and not unity that creates the kind of society in which you and I can most comfortably live. And modern Dutch attitudes are rooted in the diversity of the medieval city states of Holland and Zeeland, which demonstrates, as much as Proudhon’s regionalism, that a desirable future for all Europe lies in an accommodation of local differences.

Discussions about European integration in the 1860s prompted a skeptical reaction from Proudhon:

Among French democrats there has been much talk of a European confederation, or a United States of Europe. By this they seem to understand nothing but an alliance of all the states which presently exist in Europe, great and small, presided over by a permanent congress. It is taken for granted that each state will retain the form of government that suits it best. Now since each state will have votes in the congress in proportion to its population and territory, the small states in this so-called confederation will soon be incorporated into the large ones . . .

Swallowing up neighboring countries may be unfashionable nowadays, but we can see Proudhon’s misgivings being realized in the way debates and decisions of the European Community are dominated by the large states at the expense of the smaller member nations.

The second of my 19th-century mentors, Michael Bakunin, demands our attention for a variety of reasons. He was almost alone among that century’s political thinkers in foreseeing the horrors of the clash of modern nation states in the First and Second World Wars, as well as predicting the results of centralizing Marxism in the Russian Empire. In 1867 Prussia and France seemed to be poised for a war about who should control Luxembourg and this, through the network of interests and alliances, ‘threatened to engulf all Europe’. A League for Peace and Freedom held its congress in Geneva, sponsored by prominent people from various countries, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John Stuart Mill. Bakunin seized the opportunity to address this audience, and published his opinions under the title Fédéralisme, Socialisme, et Anti-Théologisme. This document set out 13 points on which, according to Bakunin, the Geneva Congress was unanimous.

The first of these points proclaimed

That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe.

His second point argued that this aim implied that states must be replaced by regions, for it observed

That the formation of these States of Europe can never come about between the States as constituted at present, in view of the monstrous disparity which exists between their various powers.

His fourth point claimed

That not even if it called itself a republic could any centralized, bureaucratic and by the same token militarist State enter seriously and genuinely into an international federation. By virtue of its constitution, which will always be an explicit or implicit denial of domestic liberty, it would necessarily imply a declaration of permanent war and a threat to the existence of neighboring countries.

Consequently his fifth point demanded

That all the supporters of the League should therefore bend all their energies towards the reconstruction of their various countries, in order to replace the old organization founded throughout upon violence and the principle of authority by a new organization based solely upon the interests, needs and inclinations of the populace, and owning no principle other than that of the free federation of individuals into communes, communes into provinces, provinces into nations, and the latter into the United States, first of Europe, then of the whole world.

The vision thus became bigger and bigger, but Bakunin was careful to include the acceptance of secession. His eighth point declared that

Just because a region has formed part of a State, even by voluntary accession, it by no means follows that it incurs any obligation to remain tied to it for ever. No obligation in perpetuity is acceptable to human justice . . . The right of free union and equally free secession comes first and foremost among all political rights; without it, confederation would be nothing but centralization in disguise.

Bakunin refers admiringly to the Swiss Confederation, ‘practicing federation so successfully today’, as he put it, and Proudhon too explicitly took as a model the Swiss supremacy of the commune as the unit of social organization, linked by the canton, with a purely administrative federal council. But both remembered the events of 1848, when the Sonderbund of secessionist cantons were compelled by war to accept the new constitution of the majority. Proudhon and Bakunin agreed in condemning this subversion of federalism by the unitary principle. There must be a right of secession.

Switzerland, precisely because of its decentralized structure, was a refuge for numerous political refugees from the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. One Russian anarchist was even expelled from Switzerland: he was too much even for the Swiss Federal Council. This was Peter Kropotkin, whose ideas connect 19th-century federalism with 20th-century regional geography.

Kropotkin’s youth was spent as an army officer in geological expeditions in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. His autobiography tells of the outrage he felt to see how central administration and funding destroyed any improvement of local conditions, through ignorance, incompetence, and universal corruption, and through the destruction of ancient communal institutions which might have enabled people to change their own lives. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the administrative machinery was suffocated by boredom and embezzlement. There is a similar literature from any other empire or nation state.

In 1872 Kropotkin made his first visit to Western Europe, and in Switzerland was intoxicated by the air of democracy, even a bourgeois one. In the Jura hills he stayed with the watch-makers, a community of self-employed craftsmen. His biographer Martin Miller describes his reactions:

Kropotkin’s meetings and talks with the workers on their jobs revealed the kind of spontaneous freedom without authority or direction from above that he had dreamed about. Isolated and self-sufficient, the Jura watchmakers impressed Kropotkin as an example that could transform society if such a community were allowed to develop on a large scale. There was no doubt in his mind that this community would work because it was not a matter of imposing an artificial ‘system’ such as had been attempted by Muraviev in Siberia but of permitting the natural activity of the workers to function according to their own interests.

His stay in the Jura hills was a turning point for Kropotkin. The rest of his life was, in a sense, devoted to gathering the evidence for anarchism, federalism, and regionalism.

Kropotkin’s approach is not simply a matter of academic history. In a study of Un federalista Russo, Pietro Kropotkin (1922), the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri quotes the ‘Letter to the Workers of Western Europe’ that Kropotkin handed to the British Labor Party politician Margaret Bondfield in June 1920. In the course of it he declared that:

Imperial Russia is dead and will never be revived. The future of the various provinces which composed the Empire will be directed towards a large federation. The natural territories of the different sections of this federation are in no way distinct from those with which we are familiar in the history of Russia, of its ethnography and economic life. All the attempts to bring together the consituent parts of the Russian Empire, such as Finland, the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Siberia and others, under a central authority are doomed to failure. The future of what was the Russian Empire is directed towards a federation of independent units.

Today we can see the relevance of this opinion, ignored for 70 years. As an exile in Western Europe, Kropotkin had close contact with a range of pioneers of regional thinking. The relationship between regionalism and anarchism has been handsomely delineated by the geographer Peter Hall, when director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at Berkeley, California, in his book Cities of Tomorrow (1988). There was Kropotkin’s fellow anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, arguing for small-scale human societies based on the ecology of their regions. There was Paul Vidal de la Blache, another founder of French geography, who argued that ‘the region was more than an object of survey; it was to provide the basis for the total reconstruction of social and political life’. For Vidal, as Professor Hall explains, it was the region, not the nation, which

as the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings, was the seat of comprehensible liberty and the mainspring of cultural evolution, which were being attacked and eroded by the centralized nation-state and by large-scale machine industry.

Finally there was the extraordinary Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes, who tried to encapsulate all these regionalist ideas, whether geographical, social, historical, political, or economic, into an ideology of reasons for regions, known to most of us through the work of his disciple Lewis Mumford.

Professor Hall pointed out that

many, though by no means all, of the early visions of the planning movement stemmed from the anarchist movement, which flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth . . . The vision of these anarchist pioneers was not merely of an alternative built form, but of an alternative society, nether capitalist nor bureaucratic-socialist: a society based on voluntary cooperation among men and women, working and living in small self-governing communities.

Those 19th-century anarchist thinkers were a century in advance of their contemporaries in warning the peoples of Europe of the consequences of not adopting a regionalist and federalist approach. After every kind of disastrous experience in the 20th century, the rulers of the nation states of Europe have directed policy towards several kinds of supranational entities. The crucial issue that faces them is whether to conceive of a Europe of States or a Europe of Regions.

To do them justice, the advocates of a united Europe have developed a doctrine of ‘subsidiarity’, by which governmental decisions outside the remit of the supranational institutions of the European Community should be taken by regional or local levels of administration, rather than by national governments. A resolution has been adopted by the Council of Europe, calling for national governments to adopt its Charter for Local Self-Government, ‘to formalize commitment to the principle that government functions should be carried out at the lowest level possible and only transferred to higher government by consent.’

This precept is an extraordinary tribute to Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin and the ideas that they were alone in voicing (apart from some interesting Spanish thinkers like Pi y Margall or Joaquin Costa). Of course it is one of the first aspects of pan-European ideology that national governments will choose to ignore, though there are obvious differences between various nation states in this respect. In many of them, for example Germany, Italy, Spain, and even France, the machinery of government is considerably more devolved than it was 50 years ago. The same is true of the former Soviet Union.

One anarchist thinker from the Netherlands, Thom Holterman, has set out the criteria which anarchists would see as the prerequisites for a free united Europe. His warning is precisely that the obstacle to a Europe of the Regions is the existence of nation states. Another is that because the thinking and planning of the future of Europe is in the hands of governmental bureaucracies, they are all preparing for a Europe of the bureaucrats.

Kropotkin used to cite the lifeboat institution as an example of the kind of voluntary and non-coercive organization envisaged by anarchists that could provide a worldwide service without the principle of authority intervening. Two other examples of the way in which local groups and associations could combine to provide a complex network of functions without any central authority are the post office and the railways. You can post a letter to Chili or China, confident that it will get there, as a result of freely-arrived-at agreements between different national post offices, without there being any central world postal authority at all. Or you can travel across Europe and Asia over the lines of a dozen different railway systems, public and private, without any kind of central railway authority. Coordination requires neither uniformity nor bureaucracy.

Chapter 10. Green aspirations and anarchist futures

When Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops first appeared in 1899, the precursors of the Green movement found it an inspiration, since its author stressed the productivity of small-scale decentralized industry, and of a ‘horticultural’ approach to food production, for its immense output. When his book was re-issued at the end of the First World War, an added preliminary note observed that: ‘It pleads for a new economy in the energies used in supplying the needs of human life, since these needs are increasing and the energies are not inexhaustible.’

In those days this was a rare recognition of the limits to growth. Today we have a vast literature on the problems of resource depletion and environmental destruction. The difficulty for environmental activists, trying to enlist the support of fellow citizens, is one of priorities: which campaign most urgently needs a helping hand? Capitalism roams the globe, seeking the least protected labor market and the least protected physical environment, in order to stimulate, and to win, an ever-growing market for its goods. It describes this process as ‘consumer sovereignty’ and thus evades any responsibility for its ruthless exploitation of poor people and weak economies. The richer we are, the more we are inclined to shrug off our share of this responsibility.

For many years now, we in the rich economies have had a series of movements and campaigns described in general terms as ‘environmental’, ‘conservationist’, or ‘green’, or even ‘ecological’, drawing our attention to the crises of the environment, global warming, and the depletion of finite resources. Critics of these campaigns in the rich world point out that they do not always include an awareness of the plight of the rich world’s poor. Amartya Sen remarked on the paradox that ‘In the poor world the poor are thin and the rich are fat. In the rich world the rich are thin and the poor are fat.’ He is the author of a famous study of who eats and who starves, and of what they eat, with a theory of ‘entitlements’, defining these as the set of ‘alternative commodity bundles which a person can command’. His observation is a reminder that in every society there are several simultaneous food cultures, ultimately determined by levels of poverty and affluence. In the poor world the powerful and wealthy and their military elites live grandly, while the poor are ill-nourished and sometimes starving. In the rich world a significant poor minority lives on the ‘junk food’ that the affluent can afford to despise. In Britain the number of children growing up in poverty trebled between 1968 and 1998.

Any discussion of environmental issues has to start with the fact of malnutrition in a world of plenty, and then proceed to examine the high cost of the rich world’s ‘cheap’ food. Kropotkin’s arguments included the claim that a densely populated small country like Britain could feed itself from its own land, an idea regarded as absurd even though it was based on European experience. A century later I had the pleasure of meeting Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network and coauthor of the United Nations report on Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, who explained how in Chinese cities 90% of vegetables are locally grown, and that

Hong Kong, the densest large city in the world, produces within its boundaries two-thirds of the poultry, one-sixth of the pigs, and close to half the vegetables eaten by its citizens and visitors.

The best-known examples of urban intensive food production are provided by the vast cities of South-East Asia. Singapore’s 1,500 hectares of ‘agro-technology parks’ are famous. As their admirer Geoff Wilson points out,

The inescapable logic is that while rural agriculture can need up to eight fossil fuel energy units to produce one food energy unit sold in supermarkets, urban agriculture can provide up to eight food energy units for every one fossil fuel energy unit.

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy who has been concerned for years with the implications of findings like these, reminds us that

Supermarket distribution systems are totally dependent upon cheap energy. Far from being more convenient, hypermarkets are actually making us make more, not less, shopping trips. The average number increased by 28 percent between 1978 and 1991. Shoppers also have to go further: the distance rose by 60 percent between 1978 and 1991 . . . The common factor to all this is the food retailers’ use of centralized distribution systems. Each firm has its own regional distribution centers (RDCs). All food goes to the RDC and thence to the shops. As a result the food travels much further . . .

This is known as the food-miles issue. It has been extended to even more bizarre lengths by the policies of the giant food retailers, searching the globe for suppliers who are cheapest, regardless of the diversion of local water supplies from meeting traditional local needs. In my nearest town in East Anglia I can buy Mexican carrots, Australian onions, African mange-tout peas, and Peruvian asparagus. This fact contributes far more to global warming than my careless use of electricity. Professor John Houghton, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and of the United Nations Advisory Panel on Climate Change, thought there was something absurd in the fact that he had eaten delicious new potatoes for his lunch. They had been delivered by a 40-tonne lorry to his local hypermarket after being flown by superjet to England. And, as he commented, ‘I could have grown them in my own back garden.’

His remark was important because it illustrates the gulf between our green aspirations and our actual behavior. In exploring this gap, the work of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin has been significant and influential. He, like Rachel Carson, had been a propagandist on environmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s, and this gave him the same kind of forerunner status in the emerging American Green movement. He linked this with the homegrown American anarchist tradition. ‘What we are trying to do’, he explained,

is to redeem certain aspects of the American Dream. There are, of course, several American dreams: one is the John Wayne tradition of the cowboy going out to the West, and the whole notion of pioneering individualism; another is the immigrant American dream, this being the land of opportunity where the streets are made of gold. But there is a third American dream, which is the oldest of the lot, dating back to Puritan times, which stresses community, decentralization, self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face- to-face democracy.

This is where Bookchin came into conflict with yet another American dream. As ecological awareness spread among the children of the affluent, the national guilt over the genocide of indigenous peoples led to an exaltation of the Noble Savage, and a distaste for ordinary mortals who hadn’t got the Message. What was seen as ‘Deep Ecology’ became fashionable among those affluent enough to ‘get away from it all’ and pursue every kind of mystical belief, so long as the checks kept flowing into their bank accounts. Many of Bookchin’s fellow citizens shifted from an involvement in social issues to a sentimental and privileged idealization of ‘wilderness’ and the natural environment, with a consequent misanthropy towards their fellow humans.

Bookchin’s vigorous repudiation of these approaches has sought to confront the abandonment of social concerns in an increasingly divided America, re-asserting the claims of ‘Social Ecology’ and aiming, as he said, to advance ‘a serious challenge to society with its vast, hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, state apparatus and militaristic history’.

Most anarchists would take it for granted that an ecologically viable society is incompatible with capitalism and its demand for continually expanding markets, achieved through the invention of wants and the built-in obsolescence of consumer goods. At the same time, most of us feel that in seeking more ecologically viable ways of living, we cannot wait until the downfall of the capitalist system. The Green movement has been in existence long enough for its adherents to learn which approaches are most relevant for them.

In the 1970s I was lucky enough to be employed to start a journal for teachers and students called the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE). One of its most stimulating mentors was an inventive young man called Peter Harper, who in 1975 went to Wales to join a group of enthusiasts who were starting the Center for Alternative Technology (CAT) at Machynlleth, in an old quarry in a landscape of industrial dereliction. By the end of the century that enterprise (operating as a workers’ cooperative of 28 members) was being visited by about 80,000 people every year, including 20,000 children, and is world-famous as a demonstration site for environmentally friendly power generation, building construction, and sewage disposal. I am told that it generates 90% of its own energy requirements in renewable form from sun, wind, and water.

Since he has long practical experience in this field, I take Peter Harper’s conclusions seriously. He told interviewers in 1998 that

The craze for self-sufficiency and small-is-beautiful has passed. Don’t try to do it all yourself. Start where you are strong, not where you are weak . . . Don’t try to make your energy: try to save your energy. Most of the action is going to be in cities, where the majority of humans will soon be living and where, contrary to our old Arcadian assumptions, sustainable modern lifestyles are more easily achieved.

His continual probing of the environmental consciousness of our fellow citizens has led him to make a different distinction from that between Deep Ecologists and Social Ecologists. Peter Harper divides us into Light Greens (with more money than time) and Deep Greens (with, perhaps, more time than money). The Light Greens, he suggests, are involved with the new technology of solar heating, fuel-efficient lightweight motor cars, and sustainable consumption, while the Deep Greens believe in small, insulated houses, bicycles and public transport, homegrown food, repair and recycling, local currency schemes, and barter.

Meanwhile, the rest of society will continue to belong to the culture of MORE! For, as he observes,

People aspire to greater convenience and comfort, more personal space, easy mobility, a sense of expanding possibilities. This is the modern consumerist project: what modern societies are all about. It is a central feature of mainstream politics and economics that consumerist aspirations are not seriously challenged. On the contrary, the implied official message is ‘Hang on in there: we will deliver.’ The central slogan is brutally simple: MORE!

Some of us, Peter Harper noted in his Schumacher Lecture at Bristol in 2001, have apocalyptic visions of uncontrollable catastrophes in the future resulting from indiscriminate economic activity. He, as an optimist, and from his own experience as an environmental activist, has a different expectation. He thinks that as life gradually gets worse for everyone else, the Deep Greens (the people he calls the recessive genes of the sustainability movement) will be found to have solved what he calls the great riddle of reconciling modernity and sustainability: ‘They will quite visibly be having a good time: comfortable, with varied lives and less stress, healthy and fit, having rediscovered the elementary virtues of restraint and balance.’

Twenty-five years of offering environmental choices to fellow citizens who came to the Center for Alternative Technology with a variety of motives have led Peter Harper to adopt his relaxed approach to the task of convincing us all that our lifestyles have to change. Murray Bookchin would probably react differently, but many years earlier he posed the same issues in discussing the nature of a liberatory technology, one which frees rather than enslaves us. Can we imagine, he asked, that an ecologically viable economy could be based on a centralized nation state and its bureaucratic apparatus? He urged that, from the standpoint of the viability of the planet and all living things on it, anarchist concepts are not merely desirable, they are necessary:

What was once regarded as impractical and visionary has now become eminently practical . . . If community face-to-face democracy, a humanistic, liberatory technology, and decentralization are conceived of merely as reactions to the prevailing state of affairs – a vigorous ‘nay’ to the ‘yes’ of what exists today – a compelling, objective case can be made for the practicability of an anarchist society.

14. Community gardens, as envisaged by Clifford Harper.

Environmental and ecological concerns have been advocated long enough for us to recognize peaks and troughs in the support they receive from the general, uncommitted public, whose involvement is vital for the manipulators of change. There are fashions in crisis-consciousness, as in most other aspects of our communal life. A comforting thought for anarchists is the reflection that a society advanced enough to accept the environmental imperatives of the 21st century will be obliged to reinvent anarchism as a response to them.

For a very strong case has been made by such authors as Murray Bookchin and Alan Carter that anarchism is the only political ideology capable of addressing the challenges posed by our new green consciousness to the accepted range of political ideas. Anarchism becomes more and more relevant for the new century.