The ethical argument Bookchin makes in The Modern Crisis forces readers to confront our relationship to nature. Corporations and the State have pushed for an ethical consumerism that disempowers communities from turning the tide on the wreckage we’re leaving behind on the planet. We tend to think of ourselves are similarly culpable for our polluted planet as the Exxons and Fords of the world.

 Another in our series of Murray Bookchin reprints, bringing the work of a prescient and still popular theorist to a wider audience.

 Bookchin is the thinker for our times, someone who was calling attention to environmental devastation before Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, and he continued to do so into the 21st

 Known as one of the more accessible of Bookchin’s books, the four essays in The Modern Crisis remain unique as pieces of environmental critique because Bookchin makes clear the social, economic, and political causes of our precarious situation, penetrating far more deeply than most, if not all, contemporary theorists.