Ecology & Community Program

At The Institute for Social Ecology

June 28 - July 27, 2002

The ISE's Ecology and Community program is intended as an intensive educational experience in the field of social ecology. This interdisciplinary, college-level program explores social ecology, nature philosophy, community development, political theory, social movements and activism, popular education, radical agriculture, capitalism and globalization, racism, feminism, and more. The curriculum is holistic and multifaceted, set in the context of an integrative learning approach that helps students understand the underlying principles and philosophy, as well as connections between various disciplines, that comprise social ecology. Moreover, ISE emphasizes a progressive education model that attempts to empower students through the learning process itself.

The Ecology and Community program, in short, offers a radical, coherent critique of current social and political trends, as well as a reconstructive and ethical approach to social change, all the while facilitating self-directed learning in a supportive yet challenging community-based environment.



Principles of Social Ecology

Facilitated by Daniel Chodorkoff and Chaia Heller

Social ecology is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of people's relationship to the rest of nature. Through a series of lectures and discussions, this seminar will examine major themes in social ecology: natural history and the dynamics of evolution, the emergence of hierarchy and domination, dialectical naturalism, libertarian municipalism, the politics of social ecology, feminism, ecology and development, and the utopian tradition and visions for an ecological society. Through an exploration of the theory and philosophy of social ecology, this seminar will help students develop a holistic and coherent understanding of the principles on which the field is based. Participation is recommended for all students.  

Movement Building: Theory and Practice

Facilitated by Brian Tokar and Brooke Lehman

For more than three decades, social ecologists have articulated a radical critique of conventional approaches to activism and pointed the way toward a reconstructive vision of an ecological, directly democratic, and free society. This seminar and practicum will explore the evolution and methods of community organizing and activism, looking at case studies of recent social movements and examining the ways in which a social ecological critique can help many of today's movements develop in more potent directions. Throughout the course, small groups will practice developing and articulating their own analysis, reconstructive vision, and organizing strategies around a specific issue of their own choosing.

Radical Agriculture

Facilitated by Erin Royster and Ed Smith

For the past 100 years, the practice of agriculture has moved further away from a sustaining base in ecology and natural systems, while becoming increasingly unjust. Social ecology offers a nuanced understanding of the economic and social pressures pushing agriculture down an ecologically destructive path, and helps formulate agricultural methods and food system paradigms in keeping with principles of democracy and ecology. This seminar will explore as well as critique current agricultural issues and alternatives, such as urban farming, permaculture, and community supported agriculture, while also building a reconstructive vision of society to inform agriculture and food activism. In addition, students will have the opportunity to interact with local farmers and food activists in the central Vermont community, and foster practical skills in organic gardening.

Toward Direct Democracy

Facilitated by Cindy Milstein

How can people come together to make decisions that affect society as a whole in participatory, mutualistic, and ethical ways? Social ecology offers one vision in its notion of libertarian municipalism, which conceives of politics as popular self-governance by confederated, face-to-face citizens' assemblies. With this as our frame, we will explore direct democracy as both a philosophical ideal—within political traditions such as liberalism, socialism, and anarchism—and potentially revolutionary practice. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and writing exercises, we will look at libertarian Left theories of a free society and tease out a dual power strategy of social transformation that strives to balance the global and local, the community and individual, even as it opposes statecraft and capitalism.

Understanding Capitalism: Global Perspectives

Facilitated by Darini Nicholas and Peter Staudenmaier

The goal of this course is to understand capitalism and its context. We will explore such questions as: What distinguishes capitalism as a social system? What are its origins and structures, and how do they function? What is its importance to social ecology? Drawing on the long history of emancipatory struggles against capitalism, students will gain theoretical tools to help them make sense of an apparently senseless system. We will also look at the nature and impact of colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as the historical underpinnings of racism throughout the capitalist transformation of the New World and the non-Western nations of the South through to the present state of globalization.

Radical Education, Deschooling, and Social Ecology

Facilitated by Matt Hern

For 150 years, compulsory state schooling has been a dominant feature of social life. This seminar will investigate the rationales and repercussions of a schooled society, and look at various levels of resistance to the school monopoly, from alternative schools to deschooling to home learning to municipalization. It will also explore the historical and contemporary relationships between anarchist theory, education, pedagogy, and culture, focusing on the social and political implications of deschooling. Social ecology needs to develop a coherent educational praxis, and collectively, in a variety of ways, we can examine and articulate what that might look like.

Feminism and Ecology

Facilitated by Chaia Heller

Exploring ecofeminism's roots within the radical feminist body politics of the New Left, this seminar looks critically at the transformations in ecofeminist discourse over the past two decades as the theory moves from a “cold war” ecofeminism infused with an antinuclear pacifist sensibility, to a “postcolonial” eco-feminism inspired by international forums on women, development, and the environment. This seminar focuses on the potential of creating an ecological feminist theory that in addition to challenging and transforming understandings of gender and nature, proposes an anarcha-feminism that confronts broader systems of capitalist and state power.

Confronting Racism. Challenging Privilege. Building Movements.

Workshop series facilitated by Active Solidarity Collective and others

A four-part antiracism workshop will also be offered to shed light on the origins of racism as well as how it relates to other forms of systemic oppression and hierarchy, and to suggest strategies to overcome these obstacles and build effective, multiracial movements for radical social change.

The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), located amid central Vermont's rolling mountains, has been a center for education and action working with the ideas of social ecology since the 1970s.  The ISE and its programs also serve as a forum for serious dialogue among ecological, social justice, and anti-capitalist activists, as a laboratory for new ecological technologies, and as a resource for community groups around the world.

For more information on the this or other ISE programs visit our website:

Institute for Social Ecology

Popular Education for a Free Society

1118 Maple Hill Road Plainfield, VT, 05667 USA

(802) 454-8493