Social ecology

Social ecology is divided into the following types:

• economic
• demographic
• urban
• futurological
• legal

The main task of social ecology is to study the mechanisms of human influence on the environment and those transformations in it that are the result of human activity.

Problems of social ecology are mainly reduced to three main groups:

• planetary scale - a global forecast for the population and resources in conditions of intensive industrial development (global ecology) and determination of the ways for the further development of civilization;
• regional scale - study of the state of individual ecosystems at the level of regions and regions (regional ecology);
• microscale - the study of the basic characteristics and parameters of urban living conditions (city ecology or city sociology).

Social ecology is developing and positioned as an academic field, as well as a social movement. In the latter case, it is also a critical social theory .

In the understanding of the green activist Murray Buchchin , as well as the followers of his ideas, for example, Janet Biel , social ecology is aimed at criticizing current social, political and anti-environmental trends, and represents a restructuring (reconstructing), ecological, communitarian (community) and ethical approach to society , in which people live, on the basis of promoting direct democracy and confederate politics .

As a set of ideas, social ecology provides for a moral economy that offers to go beyond deficits and hierarchies, to a new harmony of relations between human communities and the natural world, where the values ​​of diversity, creativity and freedom are recognized. M. Buchchin believes that the roots of current environmental and social problems can be traced to hierarchical (or, in his terms, “kyriarchical”) regimes of public organization.

Social ecologists argue that the systemic problem of hierarchy cannot be opposed by the actions of individuals, “actions alone,” and in particular, ethical consumption (ethical consumerism); in great detail, this problem corresponds to ethical thinking and collective activity based on radical democratic ideals. ^[one]

In the essay "What is social ecology?" Buchchin summarizes the meaning of social ecology as follows:

Social ecology is based on the belief that almost all of our contemporary environmental problems come from rooted social issues. From this it follows, from this point of view, that these environmental problems cannot be understood, let alone solve them, without a careful understanding of our modern society and the illogicality that dominates it. Let us clarify this point: economic , ethnic , cultural and gender conflicts, among others, lie at the center of the most serious environmental turmoil that we are facing today separately, of course, in contrast to those created by natural disasters ^[2] .

• Murray Bookchin
• Janet Biel

• Social ecology is a dictionary entry .
• Institute of Social Ecology .
• Social Ecology (London) A group for the study of the philosophy of social ecology.
• The works of Murray Bookchin
• Murray Bookchin's collected works