Make Rojava Green Again

What is it about the social structures of Rojava that so inspires the fierce loyalty of its defenders and its people? This book answers that question. In language that bridges the Utopian and the concrete, the poetic and the everyday, the Internationalist Commune of Rojava has produced both a vision and a manual for what a free, ecological society can look like. In these pages you will find a philosophical introduction to the idea of social ecology, a theory that argues that only when we end the hierarchical relations between human beings (men over women, young over old, one ethnicity or religion over another) will we be able to heal our relationship with the natural world.

Das Buch beginnt mit einem Vorwort von Debbie Bookchin. Nach einer Vorstellung der Arbeit und Ziele der Internationalistischen Kommune allgemein werden die Ideen von Murray Bookchin und Abdullah Öcalan einer geschlechterbefreiten, ökologischen Gesellschaft dargestellt. Die Internationalistische Kommune hat damit, laut Debbie Bookchin, beides, eine Vision und ein Handbuch angefertigt, das beschreibt, wie eine freie, ökologische Gesellschaft aussehen kann. Im Hauptteil des Buches werden dann die ökologischen Herausforderungen in Nordsyrien und mögliche Lösungsansätze für diese dargestellt. In diesem Zusammenhang wird in die Ziele der Kampagne "Make Rojava Green Again" eingeführt. Die Kampagne "Make Rojava Green Again" wurde Anfang des Jahres 2018 mit dem Ziel gestartet, den Aufbau einer ökologischen Gesellschaft in Nordsyrien in den bisherigen Bemühungen zu unterstützen und weiter zu entwickeln.

Ecological Solidarity and the Kurdish Freedom Movement: Thought, Practice, Challenges, and Opportunities is a pioneering text that examines the ideas about social ecology and communalism behind the evolving political structures in the Kurdish region. The collection evaluates practical green projects, including the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement, Jinwar women’s eco-village, food sovereignty in a solidarity economy, environmental defenders in Iranian Kurdistan, and Make Rojava Green Again. Contributors also critically reflect on such contested themes as Alevi nature beliefs, anti-dam demonstrations, human-rights law and climate change, the Gezi Park protests, and forest fires. Throughout this volume, the contributors consider the formidable challenges to the Kurdish initiatives, such as state repression, damaged infrastructure, and oil dependency. Nevertheless, contributors assert that the West has much to learn from the Kurdish ecological paradigm, which offers insight into social movement debates about development and decolonization.

For close to four decades, Murray Bookchin's eco-anarchist theory of social ecology has inspired philosophers and activists working to link environmental concerns with the desire for a free and egalitarian society. New veins of social ecology are now emerging, both extending and challenging Bookchin's ideas. For this instructive book, Andrew Light has assembled leading theorists to contemplate the next steps in the development of social ecology. Topics covered include reassessing ecological ethics, combining social ecology and feminism, building decentralized communities, evaluating new technology, relating theory to activism, and improving social ecology through interaction with other left traditions.

Murray Bookchin was not only one of the most significant and influential environmental philosophers of the twentieth century--he was also one of the most prescient. From industrial agriculture to nuclear radiation, Bookchin has been at the forefront of every major ecological issue since the very beginning, often proposing a solution before most people even recognized there was a problem. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin is the first biography of this groundbreaking environmental and political thinker. Author Janet Biehl worked as his collaborator and copyeditor for 19 years, editing his every word. Thanks to her extensive personal history with Bookchin as well as her access to his papers and archival research, Ecology or Catastrophe offers unique insight into his personal and professional life. Founder of the social ecology movement, Bookchin first started raising environmental issues in 1952. He foresaw global warming in the 1960s and even then argued that we should look into renewable energy sources as an alternative to fossil fuels. Wary of pesticides and other chemicals used in industrial agriculture, he was also an early advocate of small-scale organic farming, which has developed into the present locavore movement and the revival of organic markets. Even Occupy can trace the origins of its leaderless structure and general assemblies to the nonhierarchical organizational form Bookchin developed as a libertarian socialist. Bookchin believed that social and ecological issues were deeply intertwined. Convinced that capitalism pushes businesses to maximize profits and ignore humanist concerns, he argued that eco-crises could be resolved by a new social arrangement. His solution was Communalism, a new form of libertarian socialism that he developed. An optimist and utopian, Bookchin believed in the potentiality for human beings to use reason to solve all social and ecological problems.

This manifesto offers the essence of Öcalan's ideas on society, knowledge, and power, and they are crucial for understanding the Kurdish revolution. Öcalan argues that a criticism that limits itself to capitalism is too superficial, and in this work, he turns his eyes to the underlying structures of civilization.

When scientific socialism, which for many years was implemented by Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), became too narrow for his purposes, Öcalan deftly answered the call for a radical redefinition of the social sciences. Writing from his solitary cell in İmralı Prison, Öcalan offered a new and astute analysis of what is happening to the Kurdish people, the Kurdish freedom movement, and future prospects for humanity. The Sociology of Freedom is the fascinating third volume of a five-volume work titled The Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization. The general aim of the two earlier volumes was to clarify what power and capitalist modernity entailed. Here, Öcalan presents his stunningly original thesis of the democratic civilization, based on his criticism of capitalist modernity. Ambitious in scope and encyclopedic in execution, The Sociology of Freedom is a one-of-a-kind exploration that reveals the remarkable range of one of the Left’s most original thinkers with topics such as existence and freedom, nature and philosophy, anarchism and ecology. Öcalan goes back to the origins of human culture to present a penetrating reinterpretation of the basic problems facing the twenty-first century and an examination of their solutions. Öcalan convincingly argues that industrialism, capitalism, and the nation-state cannot be conquered within the narrow confines of a socialist context. Recognizing the need for more than just a critique, Öcalan has advanced what is the most radical, far-reaching definition of democracy today and argues that a democratic civilization, as an alternative system, already exists but systemic power and knowledge structures, along with a perverse sectarianism, do not allow it to be seen. The Sociology of Freedom is a truly monumental work that gives profuse evidence of Öcalan’s position as one of the most influential thinkers of our day. It deserves the careful attention of anyone seriously interested in constructive thought or the future of the Left.