Visitors to the university of California campus in Los Angeles, especially visitors from the east coast or from Europe, almost inevitably comment on the look of the students, who are predominantly bleached blond, nubile, tanned all year round, and have the whitest, straightest teeth imaginable. Furthermore, they all, males and females, wear shorts and, especially in spring, are mostly to be found sprawling on the grass under the blooming jacarandas, engaged in various kinds of mating rituals. The campus, in short, looks like an extension of Malibu Beach.

Into this urban pastoral bliss shuffles a late-middle-aged man in rumpled shirt and slacks and a corduroy cap with ear flaps. Ever since he joined the revolutionary Young Pioneers in 1930 and began picking fights with boy scouts in his native Bronx, Murray Bookchin has been stirring things up. Now, a self-described eco-anarchist, Bookchin is in California to wage war, and the warriors are sects within the environmental brigade. What is at stake are the hearts and minds of the young idealists on campuses across the country.

Murray Bookchin is at the centre of the ecology movement's latest family feud. His targets are two of the most influential trends within radical environmentalism &emdash; the biocentric view of 'deep ecology', which sees humanity as a disproportionately destructive species among millions of equally valuable species on the planet- and the sometimes overlapping New Age-style spirituality that seeks mystical or meditative solutions to environmental ills.

A driving force in the so-called left green movement, Bookchin says he got his revolutionarv fervour from his Russian immigrant parents while still in the cradle. There are interesting parallels with Australia's own pioneer of green political action, Jack Mundey. Bookchin was an industrial labourer in the forties, became a mainstream Marxist union organiser, but transformed himself into an anarchist when he perceived the leftist movement becoming as bureaucratic and centralised as the capitalist machine. Mundey, too, has always been critical of existing Marxist states like the Soviet Union, and of the cult of leadership. Remember that he stood down from leadership of the Builders Labourers Federation after two terms, much to the dismay of local greenies who valued his commitment to direct action when necessary. Both Mundey and Bookchin are essentially self taught; fine examples of what Gramsci called organic proletarian intellectuals.

As early as 1962 Bookchin was raising the environmental alarm (about pesticides) in his book Our Synthetic Environment. He has written about solar and wind power. In 1974 he helped create the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont. From the social ecology perspective, the human species is a part of nature, but rather than an absolute equal with other species, 'we are nature rendered self conscious', he told students last month. 'We are made to intervene in nature by nature.'

This belief in human responsibility to intervene in nature puts him at odds with deep ecology, which he has labelled 'a wilderness cult at best, intellectually frivolous at worst'. The argument began several years ago, over an article by the late novelist-naturalist Edward Abbey, who had written that immigration into the US, especially from Latin America, posed a serious threat to America's natural resources, and must be stopped. Bookchin then attacked Earth First!, the publication of the radical, deep ecology group of the same name, which ran an article entitled 'Is AIDS the Answer to an Environmentalist's Prayer?', along with discussions of the possibility that such catastrophes as starvation in Ethiopia would have a positive environmental effect by reducing population. Such views (which Earth First! never endorsed editorially) Bookchin describes as eco-fascism.

While he no longer professes an explicitly Marxist philosophy, Bookchin argues that capitalism and hierarchy are the real cancers afflicting the planet. He calls for fundamental changes in the economics and politics of the world. To ecologists whose world view is primarily spiritual, he argues that we can't count on prayers, rituals and good vibes to remove this cancer. We have to fight it actively, with all the power we can muster. Earth First! activists were quick to fire back, labelling social ecology nothing but recycled leftist drivel. The debate leapt from esoteric publications like Green Synthesis to more widely read journals like Nation. Bookchin was attacked by such deep ecology luminaries as Gary Snyder, a Pulitzer prizewinning poet, and Bill Devall, a sociology professor and co-author of Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Both deny the charge that deep ecologists are misanthropic. But Devall believes that nature-centred spiritual beliefs add depth to ecological thought.

The important philosophical difference here concerns who is responsible for our deteriorating environment. The social ecology folks resent the argument of the deep ecologists that humanity is responsible. Bookchin told the story of an exhibit at the New York Museum of Natural History shortly after Earth Day in 1970, an exhibit that portrayed numerous ways in which the environment is under seige. The final display was a mirror. He watched as a teacher led two black girls up to the mirror and, as they stood looking at themselves, read them the exhibit's caption: 'The greatest threat of all.'

'Why', Bookchin asks, 'were these two little girls, disempowered, themselves victims of air and water pollution and other ecological threats, labelled as responsible?' He sees it as vital to point the finger at the multinational corporations and their executives, not at Everywo/man. Philosophically, then, he is delineating a very different analysis of our environmental problems and the strategies that follow.

While mainstream environmentalists carry on fine-tuning their positions on various issues, seemingly unaffected by these controversies, in the radical wings the fight for the moral high ground continues. What is at stake is the leadership of the activist wing of environmental politics. As always, the left dilutes its own potential impact by its family feuding.

Leonie Sandercock is professor of urban studies at the University of California, Los Angeles

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