Bookchin is an anarchist who argues that although the problems are extreme, environmentalists have in general gotten the causal sequence backward. Mass poverty, starvation, dispossession, slums, and alienation is not the result of overpopulation, nor the cause of environmental degradation. Rather these crises of human dysfunction and environmental breakdown are the result of a driving capitalism dependent on growth and consumerism. People have been shoved off the land all over the world by agribusiness. Environmentalists have not understood the true causal forces. Humans are capable of changing these institutional forces, but not until they are correctly understood.
