Debbie Bookchin

Debbie Bookchin is a longtime journalist and author who has won awards for her news, feature and investigative writing. She has reported for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and The New York Review of Books. Bookchin's commentaries have appeared in The Nation, Roar Magazine, Vermont Public Radio, and other outlets. She has been a guest lecturer at Williams College, the University of Sussex, University of Leeds, Sheffield Hallam University, the Institute of Political Ecology, and the E.F. Schumacher College, among others, and has been a featured speaker at a variety of events including The Left Forum in New York City, The Network for an Alternative Quest in Hamburg, Germany, and the Fearless Cities summits in Barcelona and New York City. She served for three years as press secretary to U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders when he first assumed office in 1991. Bookchin was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of two activist parents. Her father is the philosopher and social theorist Murray Bookchin, author of 24 books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages. Murray Bookchin is credited with originating the critical social theory known as social ecology, which had a major impact on the New Left of the 1960s, the alter-globalization movement, and more recently, the Kurdish autonomy movement, with its anti-capitalist, reconstructive, ecological, feminist, and communalist vision of social organization. Her mother, Beatrice Bookchin, worked alongside her father for 57 years, contributing to the development of his theoretical ideas and running twice in Burlington, Vermont municipal elections on a radical municipalist platform of building an ecological city, a moral economy and citizen assemblies that would contest the power of the nation state. Many of the ideas that have animated this philosophy and its expression in the Kurdish autonomous region of Northern Syria known as Rojava can be found in Murray Bookchin's book of essays, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso Books 2015), which Debbie Bookchin coedited. It is available in German, Greek, Italian, Turkish, and Korean, Spanish, and French. Bookchin's philosophy of social ecology is also discussed in new editions of his books: From Urbanization to Cities, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, The Modern Crisis, Remaking Society and the forthcoming Towards An Ecological Society, all newly updated and edited by Debbie Bookchin and published by AK Press. For interviews with her, see: greeneuropeanjournal.eu/municipalism-murray-bookchins-legacy/ or roarmag.org/essays/bookchin-interview-social-ecology/ Or listen at: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/the-philosophy-of-murray-bookchin-an-interview-with-debbie-bookchin She is on Twitter: @debbiebookchin