Aug 15, 2015

The Emergence of Eco-decentralism

 
Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco-decentralism
by Janet Biehl        http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/books/

http://www.biehlonbookchin.com
In the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920 and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to administer them.

He would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore. Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.