A discipline that links ecological problems with social problems: “…The hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society give rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world” (Murray Bookchin). Some key emphases:

• The paradigm of domination of nature followed from domination of society by the state and, before that, of women by men. * Institutionalized hierarchy and domination damage the biosphere and subjugate humans to widespread social injustices. They should be replaced by practices that favor thinking and acting in terms of complementarity. * The artificial bifurcation of the world into "natural" and "unnatural" (human) cannot stand. We are part of the natural world we damage through our "second nature" symbol-juggling capacities. * Capitalism based on perpetual expansion is wasteful and outmoded. * The crisis of our time is not the emergence of cities, but of an urbanization that ruins cities and rural areas alike. * Bookchin criticizes deep ecology’s blindness to the emergence of hierarchy: “As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will remain a predominant ideology and inevitably lead our planet to the brink, if not into the abyss, of ecological extinction. ”