Dan Chodorkoff

Visionary essays from a founder of the modern ecology movement. In this collection of essays, Murray Bookchin's vision for an ecological society remains central as he addresses questions of urbanism and city planning, technology, self-management, energy, utopianism, and more. Throughout, he opposes efforts to reduce ecology to a toothless "environmentalism," a task as vital today as when these essays were first published. Written between 1969 and 1979, the essays in this collection represent a fascinating and fertile period in Bookchin's life. Coming out of the unfulfilled promise of the sixties and trying to develop a revolutionary critique of social life that avoided the pitfalls of Marxism, he was entering his creative intellectual peak. He was laying the foundations of a truly social ecology: a society based on decentralization, interdependence, democratic self-management, mutual aid, and solidarity. Presented with clarity and fervor, these key works contain the kernels of concerns that would occupy him until his death in 2006. This edition also includes a new foreword by Dan Chodorkoff, someone who was with Bookchin at the founding of his Institute for Social Ecology and who understand his work better than anyone.

The year in 1968 and idealistic anti-war activists David and Jill have moved to an abandoned hill farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom to start a commune-hoping to refocus their efforts to build a new society. Joined by a rotating cast of committed activists and fairweather freeloaders alike, David and Jill are confronted by the harsh environment of northern Vermont, where they discover the complexity of country life, make connections with their new neighbors (good and bad), and struggle to find their place until the fissures blowing apart the larger anti-war movement reach their collective at Zion Farm. Sugaring Down burrows below the surface of sixties counterculture and the New Left to explore the contradictions and passions that lead to the implosion of the protagonists' dreams, and their turns down two very different paths." When I read Dan Chodorkoff's historically vivid Vermont novel, I thought of Faulkner's famous statement: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Sugaring Down takes place in the turbulent 60's, when the Vietnam war was malignantly in our communal hearts and minds. But Chodorkoff's story is also about the friendships and fateful decisions we made in our flurried passions, at the same time hauntingly sensed that we may never again feel quite so alive."-Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause

How can we avert ecological catastrophe? How can we build community? What is the practical relevance of utopia? These are some of the questions anthropologist Dan Chodorkoff explores in his essays on social ecology and community development. The Anthropology of Utopia surveys alternative ways of life that can help us create an ecological society. The solutions to our crises, Chodorkoff argues, lie within our grasp and in our own communities. Chodorkoff offers a wealth of stimulating practical examples, from both urban and rural communities, drawn from his life-long commitment to community politics, and also offers sober reflections on their lessons and significance for future ecological activism. The Anthropology of Utopia seeks to unite our aspirations and our realities. It is not an academic treatise: it is a call for action. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand and change their community--and the world.

Catherine, a young anarchist estranged from her parents and squatting in an abandoned building on New York's Lower East Side is fighting with her boyfriend and conflicted about her work on an underground newspaper. After learning of a developer's plans to demolish a community garden, Catherine builds an alliance with a group of Puerto Rican community activists. Together they confront the confluence of politics, money, and real estate that rule Manhattan. All the while she learns important lessons from her great-grandmother's life in the Yiddish anarchist movement that flourished on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century. In this coming of age story, family saga, and tale of urban politics, Dan Chodorkoff explores the "principle of hope", and examines how memory and imagination inform social change.