Green infrastructure for pollinators

Pollinators – bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, ants, bats, hummingbirds and others – are a vital component of the planet’s ecosystems. Almost 90% of all flowering plants and more than a third of the world’s crop species depend on them. Countless species of birds and mammals feed on fruits and seeds that couldn’t exist without them. With pollinator populations in steep decline, it is becoming ever more crucial to ensure that these imperiled creatures have safe havens in which to thrive.

Through the smart use of so-called “green infrastructure,” the same urban landscapes that are eating up wildlife habitats with such devastating effects also present opportunities to create those havens.

Green infrastructure can take many forms, from street trees to green stormwater infrastructure like the bioswales and rain gardens now used in many cities to manage stormwater runoff and mitigate flooding. Much of this infrastructure can double as wildlife habitat, and some can be particularly beneficial to pollinators.

Living roofs

While each species has its own specific habitat needs, there are two that are common to all pollinators: an abundance of diverse, flowering native or naturalized plants, and safe places to nest and breed. Among the most effective (and cost-effective) forms of nature-based urban infrastructure in meeting these needs are “living roofs” or “rooftop meadows” planted with wildflowers and native grasses and/or other native or naturalized pollinator-friendly plant species. 

High above the city streets, even in the densest urban settings, these hotbeds of biodiversity can support all kinds of pollinators, from bees and butterflies to birds, bats, flies and ants. Studies have found that they can be particularly valuable to bees, especially when planted with diverse native forbs (flowering, non-grassy herbaceous plants) to provide foraging resources and designed to take into account the differing nesting habits of different bee species. (Interestingly, research has also suggested that living roofs can also enhance the performance of rooftop solar panels.)

Where living roofs have been planted to restore lost pollinator habitat, the results have often been quite extraordinary. The six-acre roof meadow of the Vancouver Convention Center, for example – “the only and largest coastal meadow” in downtown Vancouver – is planted with more than 400,000 indigenous plants and grasses, providing habitat for birds, insects and other creatures. Since it was built in 2009, 250 types of insects have been seen on the roof, including two species of pollinator previously thought to be extinct in the Vancouver metro area.

Green walls

Natural elements can be incorporated into building design in numerous other ways. “Living walls,” for example, can host a wide range of different plants, from grasses, shrubs, ferns, succulents and herbaceous plants to all manner of vegetables and herbs, and when designed with the needs of specific species in mind, can potentially be a promising pollinator habitat.

Living walls - also known as “green walls”, vertical greening systems, vertical gardens, or biowalls – are among the least tried and tested forms of green infrastructure, but research suggests they have potential to provide pollinators with important sources of forage and shelter – and to do so without conflicting with human demands for space in cities.

The space on a building that could be used for green walls could be as much as double that of the ground space that that building occupies, meaning existing urban architecture could be a huge untapped resource for creating pollinator habitat. There are two basic kinds of green walls: “green facades,” which use hanging plants or climbing plants rooted in planters or in the ground, and “living walls,” where plants are rooted in the wall itself, kind of like the vertical equivalent of living roofs. This means they can host a much greater range of plants and flowers, making them especially promising for pollinator conservation.

Living walls are still very much an emerging technology, but there's already a growing list of examples to draw from. Three thousand square feet of living wall on Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, known as the “Living Billboard,” has proved attractive to pollinators like hummingbirds. UK retail giant Marks & Spencer has been installing living walls on its stores for years. Almost 3,000 square feet of wall at London’s famous Wimbledon tennis courts are home to more than 14,000 plants, and the spectacular facades of the Athenaeum Hotel and Residences and The Rubens at the Palace in London provide habitat to butterflies, bees, birds and other wildlife, as do similar structures at Liberty Park at the World Trade Center in New York, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and numerous others all over the world.

Native landscaping

Roadsides present a huge opportunity to transform municipal infrastructure to support pollinators. The U.S. has more than 4 million miles of roadway, and much of the land alongside those roads can easily be planted with native vegetation and flowers and provide a valuable refuge in which pollinator species can nest and breed. Strategies like roadside wildflower planting, planting pollinator host plants in public parks and other municipal land, and providing resources for homeowners to convert yards and street-facing margins from turf to native landscapes, are easy wins for pollinator-friendly green infrastructure. 

The strips of ground between the road and the sidewalk – known in California as parkways, and elsewhere as curb strips, tree lawns, “devil strips” and various other names – are pollinator habitat waiting to happen. Often these areas are technically city property but the responsibility of individual homeowners to maintain, and this provides an opportunity for residents and city authorities to work together to create native habitats that can provide crucial sources of nourishment and shelter for pollinator species.

Some cities already offer programs to provide native plants and other resources for homeowners looking to convert their parkways to native habitat. The expansion of these kinds of schemes nationwide could give a major boost to citizen involvement in creating safe spaces for the bees, butterflies and other creatures that exist as an essential, yet often neglected component of natural ecosystems.

Encouraging pollinator-friendly development

City and state authorities are going to need to up their green infrastructure game over the coming years for a whole range of reasons besides helping pollinators. But to the greatest extent possible, and where appropriate, that infrastructure should be conceived so as to incorporate pollinator-friendly habitat.

Local agencies can lead by example, from installing green roofs and walls on municipal buildings to transforming roadsides into pollinator habitat and implementing other citywide initiatives to weave pollinator-friendly living elements into the urban fabric across other publicly managed green spaces.

Policymakers can also use various legislative carrots and sticks to ensure that provisions for native pollinators are incorporated into future development. Some cities, for example, like Austin and Portland, have revised their zoning laws to give “density bonuses” or other zoning incentives to developers who incorporate living roofs into new construction projects. Other cities offer discounts on stormwater fees or provide tax incentives to developers installing green roofs, as is the case in Washington, D.C. A growing number of cities – Toronto, San Francisco and Copenhagen, among others – have gone further, passing legislation mandating the installation of green roofs on all new buildings and renovations.

Increased attention to the importance of pollinators has led to an increase in new sources of government funding being made available to expand their habitat, including funding specifically for the kinds of programs discussed above. In the U.S., the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) provides a total of $10 million to be distributed via the DOT to states, tribes and federal agencies to implement measures to restore pollinator habitat along roadways, for example, such as planting native wildflowers and grasses, removing non-native vegetation, and adopting pollinator-friendly land management practices designed to promote pollinator host plants and limit disturbance during periods of highest use by specific species.

Just as the urban world must strive to provide a livable habitat for its human populations, it can, and must, provide an environment in which its non-human residents can thrive. With targeted investment and proper attention to the growing body of science on the integration of nature into urban design, the cities of the 21st century can play their part in helping our beleaguered pollinators bounce back.

Rewilding the ocean

As the global push to create Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) gathers pace, driven by the 30x30 campaign to protect 30% of the planet’s wild lands and waters by 2030, so too have the misgivings being voiced in various parts of the conservation community about just how effective MPAs really are. Vox senior environmental reporter Benji Jones recently summarized some of these concerns in a dispiritingly titled article “America’s best idea to protect its oceans has one big problem: It’s not working.” 

Jones’s article shines a light on some important issues surrounding the current state of MPAs – the main one being that a lot of them aren’t actually protected at all. While on paper, almost half of America’s ocean is covered by some form of protection, in reality, only around 3% of the total U.S. MPA area is completely off limits to human interference, leaving the vast majority vulnerable to exploitation – including hugely destructive fishing practices that have in some cases led to immense damage to ecosystems within their borders.

The specific criticisms Jones raises in his article are not wrong. But the headline is, at best, misleading. As real-world experience of MPAs grows, it’s becoming abundantly clear that fully protected “no-take” MPAs – those in which all extractive and destructive activities are banned – are actually highly effective in preserving biodiversity, strengthening the resilience of marine ecosystems and helping to restore wildlife habitats and populations.

Take, for example, California’s MPAs. Within a decade of the establishment of a network of fully protected zones in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, studies were indicating that the density of targeted (i.e., fished) fish species had increased inside the protected zones by 50% and their biomass by 80% in the first five years of the reserves’ existence. The biomass of predators inside the reserves was “significantly greater” than in unprotected areas, with 1.8 times more piscivores and 1.3 times more carnivores in these zones. Subsequent research has found that the average size and abundance of certain species was “significantly larger” in the protected areas, and noted increases in the biomass of certain species occurring much faster inside the reserves than in surrounding areas.

Or take Cabo Pulmo in Mexico – a 27-square-mile no-take MPA between Pulmo Point and Los Frailes Cape, created in the late 1990s. A 2011 study revealed that within just 10 years of the implementation of protections, overall biomass in the MPA had increased by 463%, bringing the area’s coral reef, previously stripped almost completely barren due to overfishing, to a level comparable to unfished reefs. Fish size had also increased, and the biomass of top predators like sharks and grouper had grown by 1,070%. The combination of higher densities and larger fish created an average biomass more than five times that of nearby unprotected areas.

These aren’t anomalies. The more we get to know about MPAs, the clearer it becomes that fully-protected areas consistently help to support larger, healthier and more diverse populations of ocean species and help protect the balance and integrity of marine ecosystems, both within their boundaries and in the surrounding area.

A 2009 analysis synthesizing a range of studies of fully protected MPAs around the world showed that these protections result in significant increases in biomass, the size and density of organisms and the number of species present – all key metrics used to assess the health of the ocean. In half of the MPAs studied, total biomass of studied species was more than triple that of unprotected areas, and density more than 60% higher. A study of the Governor Island reserve in Australia found that the biomass of rock lobsters was a whopping 2,300% higher in the protected area than outside it, and in the Las Cruces Reserve in Chile, the population of the species being monitored were on average 2,210% higher inside the MPA than outside it.

Other research presents similarly eye-catching figures. One 2017 study, for example, found that average biomass of fish in fully protected MPAs was 670% greater than in nearby unprotected areas and 343% greater than in partially protected MPAs. Interestingly, that study also found that fish biomass was restored in fully protected marine reserves over time after the implementation of protections, whereas in partially protected MPAs it was not.

MPAs have also been found to protect and enhance biodiversity within their borders. A 2006 meta-analysis of data from 44 fully protected MPAs showed that levels of biodiversity in these areas increased by an average of 23%, and fish numbers in surrounding areas also significantly increased as a result of spillover from the protected zones.

Increased biodiversity in turn increases degraded ecosystems’ ability to recover from degradation. For example, within two decades of its designation, a fully protected area in New Zealand’s Leigh Marine Reserve recovered from destruction of kelp forests triggered by the unchecked growth of its sea urchin population, which thrived in the absence of heavily-fished predator species. Restrictions on fishing allowed for a rise in predator populations, including sea urchin-eating fish, resulting in the revival of the area’s kelp forest and a return of the local ecosystem to a complex, healthy condition.

The list of studies is long and growing, but the point is this:

The patchy record of MPAs in U.S. waters doesn’t point to inherent problems with the MPA concept. It just shows we’re doing it wrong.

The 30x30 target is a decent enough target to aim for, but randomly cordoning off 30% of the ocean and claiming you’ve met your conservation goals isn’t going to have any real impact. For that to happen, a number of other conditions have to be met.

Firstly, ‘protection’ has to mean ‘full protection.’ Not fisheries management areas. Not flimsy regulations that include exceptions for certain kinds of fishing or mere prohibitions on certain types of fishing gear or shipping. Full protections, with all extractive activities off limits.

Second, the protected area must include 30% (at least) of every geographic and ecological region – not just one massive chunk of ocean in the western Pacific. Given the lack of fully protected MPAs in U.S. waters outside of the remote Pacific, the immediate priority should be ensuring that full protections are put in place across all key regions to preserve the diverse habitats and ecosystems in the country’s waters. Right now, special attention should be given to near-shore areas, currently significantly underrepresented in the U.S. MPA inventory.

By the same token, creating small, isolated MPAs is not, in itself, enough to have a major impact. MPAs should be as large as possible (when it comes to marine protections, science shows that size does matter), and should be ecologically linked in regional networks to ensure connectivity between habitats. Research shows that well-connected, ecologically coherent MPA networks can help highly mobile marine animals like whales and sea turtles by protecting important sites along their migratory routes, such as feeding and breeding grounds. (In the western Pacific, for example, protection of the nesting beaches and foraging habitats of green turtles, and portions of their routes to foraging grounds outside the protected zone, has played a role in rescuing these animals from the brink of extinction.)

Lastly, planning, designing and implementing MPAs and MPA networks needs to be based in a comprehensive, strategic, science-based process that integrates regional scientific knowledge and engages local communities and other stakeholders, coupled with a robust strategy for how these protections are going to be monitored and enforced once they’ve been implemented – as happened in California, whose progress toward successful marine protected areas is now widely considered a valuable case study in how to plan, implement and manage a statewide network of MPAs.)

With the health of the world’s ocean hanging in the balance, the need for action to boost the ocean’s resilience against the myriad threats it currently faces has never been greater. Combating those threats will require action on a range of different fronts simultaneously – one of which is the establishment of marine protected areas. Get it right, and they work.

How (and why) to depave a city

The surge in urbanization across the world over the last century has seen countless millions of square miles of natural land paved over with concrete, asphalt and other impermeable materials – and it’s causing immense damage.

From increasing flood risk and preventing the natural filtration of pollutants - thus impacting water quality and damaging aquatic habitats and ecosystems - to exacerbating the “urban heat island effect” and the myriad health impacts that come with it, what began as a way of meeting the needs of the 20th century has become an obstacle to addressing the challenges of the 21st, threatening cities’ ability to remain livable places capable of withstanding the effects of a changing climate.

A close look at pretty much any urban area will reveal plenty of impervious surface that simply doesn’t need to be there – from tiny patches of ground like redundant pieces of sidewalk and abandoned lots, through to schoolyards, nurseries, parking lots, public squares, extra lanes on roads that are never used, parking spots on streets where no one ever parks, and so on. And it’s not just public spaces. How many of us have paved yards? And why? Do they really need to be paved?

People have been asking these kinds of questions for years – the Green Guerilla movement, for example, formed in New York in the 1970s, promoted the revegetation of neighborhoods through direct action by local residents, and neighborhood groups in many cities have repurposed unused pavement for community gardens and other green spaces over the years. But the idea of removing unnecessary impervious surfaces from our cities is increasingly beginning to shift from the margins to the mainstream.

Spearheading these efforts, the Oregon-based nonprofit “Depave,” which emerged from a neighborhood association in Portland in 2008, has worked with schools, social service organizations, local businesses and other entities to implement depaving projects across the city (as well as running events and courses for other groups hoping to emulate its work). In its first five years, the organization claims, with the help of more than 700 volunteers, Depave organized the removal of some 94,100 square feet of unnecessary paving (roughly equivalent to around two football fields).

Elsewhere, rising temperatures have prompted communities in Los Angeles to explore de-paving as a way of combating the heat island effect and improving soil quality (the city’s 2021 “Healthy Soils Strategy” recommends research into “unpaving underutilized spaces and using them for composting/mulching operations and/or to create healthy soil.”) The need to enhance water quality, bring down temperatures and improve stormwater management has led other cities, including Seattle and San Francisco, to explore the possibilities of depaving.

In some places, the idea of getting rid of unnecessary pavement has become more formally embedded in local policy frameworks. Tacoma, Wash., for example, is one of several communities in the Puget Sound area that have implemented depaving projects as part of broader sustainable urban planning efforts, focusing on reducing impervious surfaces and promoting environmental resilience. Similarly, in 2023, the Sustainability Department at St. Louis Park, Minnesota, through its new Depave SLP initiative, began offering financial reimbursement to property owners for removing pavement and replacing it with vegetation, with the aim of bringing down temperatures, reducing flooding and improving air quality.

Other cities have been more creative with their incentives. A couple of years ago, Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands – both cities with a longstanding affinity for tiled gardens – went head to head in a “tile-popping” competition to see which city could remove the most tiles from its gardens, part of a larger green initiative that tapped into an age-old rivalry between the two cities to rile their residents into reshaping their own neighborhoods (Rotterdam won, removing a total of 47,942 tiles).

Elsewhere in Europe, some years ago the local council of the Montchat district in the French city of Lyon began having conversations about de-concreting their neighborhood with the aim of encouraging the spread of biodiversity by opening up new areas of natural ground and establishing ecological connections between existing green spaces.

The result of those conversations was the formation of a group of residents who set about mapping every square meter of concrete in the neighborhood and the uses associated with it in order to identify spaces that could feasibly be turned back into open ground. Their findings were then presented to the local authorities to form the basis of an action plan to remove all the concrete identified as unnecessary and then plant and maintain those spaces. 

Also in France, in 2022, after several summers of record-breaking temperatures, the city of Nantes adopted its “Plan plein terre” (Open Ground Plan) to “reduce mineral surfaces [and] restore natural, permeable soils, while increasing tree cover and vegetation across the city.” Nantes has set itself the target of vegetating at least seven hectares of land by 2026, increasing the area of open ground by 15 to 25% and increasing the city’s tree cover by 50%.

Both the Nantes and Lyon initiatives – and others throughout France, such as the nonprofit Bleu Versant de la Rochelle, which in 2020, funded by the Loire Bretagne Water Agency, launched a depaving program called Under the Tarmac, the Ocean! with the aim of improving water quality – have a strong participatory dimension, actively involving residents at all stages of planning and implementing the projects.

Cross-sector partnerships between individuals, neighborhood groups, nonprofits and local authorities have been a consistent feature of depaving projects and provide one template for how to begin unlocking the potential of nature in our cities. Public funding, as well as policy-level changes in land use regulations, transportation and other spheres – e.g., promoting high-density development and non-auto modes of transport – can provide an important boost to citizen-led endeavors, and vice versa.

A good place to start, policy-wise, might be to rethink some of the infrastructure built in the 20th century that may not meet the needs of the 21st. The need for certain features of the urban landscape designed to serve the needs of a car-based transportation system, for example – parking lots, even some roads – could gradually diminish if cities were to adopt policies conducive to more compact, transit-oriented development and walkable and bike-friendly neighborhoods. (Right now, roughly 30% of all urban surface area in the U.S. is taken up by roads and parking lots, and in some cities more than double that.)

As cities continue to expand and the impacts of excessive concrete and asphalt become more and more acute, restoration of permeable surfaces is going to have to become a priority for city authorities. Local-level depaving initiatives can be relatively inexpensive solutions – especially given the proven appetite among urban residents to take on much of the work themselves – but their aggregate impact can be huge. With a little ambition, and proper support, it is possible to achieve real results.

A Living Revolution reviewed in HaGalil

by Professor Siegbert Wolf
(German original here, published April 2022)

Alongside the anarchist collectives in Spain from 1936 to 1939, the kibbutz movement is one of the most important and long-lasting social experiments, and at the same time one of the 20th century’s “most important practical experiences of self-government” (p. 190). The social and religious philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) emphasised the cooperative settlement movement in Eretz Israel as “new territory of social organisation”[1] with regard to communitarian community projects in Europe and North America. He praised the kibbutzim as the most remarkable socio-utopian venture undertaken to date, combining production and consumption, industry, agriculture and crafts. Buber’s scepticism about social hierarchies and state centralism underpinned his continued sympathy for a free, egalitarian restructuring of society: a cooperative, federalist association in self-organised, grassroots-democratic and decentralised social and economic communities.

With his book, first published in 2009 and now also available in German, political scientist James Horrox, who conducted numerous interviews and discussions with kibbutz members, scholars and activists in Israel, Europe and North America, presents a detailed and readable study of the more than 140-year history of the kibbutz movement and its anarchist influences. While the importance of the kibbutzim in “the process of founding a nation and in the reorientation of an entire population” (p. 10) is well known, this is less true of the fact that the kibbutz movement, as an egalitarian and communitarian community, is “the ideological offspring of the anarchist tradition” (p. 11). It is this connection between the cooperative-federative commune movement and anarchist social utopia that Horrox’s study explores.

At the end of the 19th century, as a result of anti-Semitic pogroms and economically desperate conditions Jews in Eastern Europe in particular were looking for a new combination of social-revolutionary radicalism with regard to their Jewish identity, and found this, partly, in (non-statist) cultural Zionism, and in the cooperative settlement movement in Palestine. As a result, a growing number of voices favored a socialist-Zionist perspective, i.e., focused on building their own society in which Jews were no longer at the mercy of the benevolence of a Christian majority population. Above all, Jewish anarchists emphasised the need for a communitarian society through libertarian cooperative kibbutzim in Eretz Israel. Marxist ideas, on the other hand, which would subsequently become more prominent in the 1920s, “were unable to exert any formative influence on the reality of life in the kibbutz” (p. 124).

Horrox elaborates in detail on the ideological foundations of the self-organising kibbutzim, which were based, at least initially, on collective ownership of land and means of production, joint work, mutual aid, social equality, local autonomy and direct democracy. Here he recalls Peter Kropotkin’s (1842-1921) anarcho-communist conception of the “industrial village” and “mutual aid” directed against industrial capitalism, as well as the principle of “to each according to their needs”. Gustav Landauer's communitarian anarchism, which called for the creation of the socialist society of the future in the ‘here and now’ by practicing new social arrangements in the relationship between people and nature, was widely received. Although Landauer was not himself an adherent of political Zionism, he followed the Jewish settlement movement with sympathetic interest, as documented in his 1919 correspondence with Nahum Goldmann (1895-1982), who later became President of the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization (pp. 204-208). Besides Martin Buber, through whom Landauer’s anarchism reached socialist Zionist circles, other role models for this libertarian socialist communitarianism were the Hebrew writer Aharon David Gordon (1856-1922), who in his writings described a “love of physical work and nature” (p. 42) and was influenced by the agrarian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), and the socialist-Zionist politician Chaim Arlosoroff (1899-1933).

The main part of Horrox’s study is devoted to the history of the kibbutzim, their beginnings and foundations from the late 19th century, and their social context. Of the six Aliyot [waves of Jewish immigration] to Eretz Israel, mainly from Eastern Europe, the actual founding of socialist kibbutzim is closely linked to the second (1904-1914) and third Aliyot (1919-1923): “The lifestyle they practiced was based on political and material equality, freedom, democracy, and collective ownership of property. The main concern of the community was the abolition of all hierarchy and rank. […] The decision-making structure was based solely on direct democracy.” (p. 34)

The founders of these kibbutzim were guided by “clearly defined substantive objectives” and “principal convictions” (p. 57) of revolutionizing all areas of life, largely based on the history, theory and (communitarian) practice of anarchism: “This new anarchist society should be created around a participatory economy and be free from any government and external administration.” (p. 58) Added to this was the idea of joining the collective settlements together into a federalised structure: “The movement worked throughout the 20th century on this federative basis via the principle of mutual aid among the kibbutzim, notwithstanding the complex and extensive processes of divisions and unifications [within and between federations] during this period.” (p. 121)

As part of the socialist communitarian movement, the kibbutzim saw themselves as ecological, self-governing, post-capitalist communities based on the freedom of the individual, socially just and free from domination, with grassroots democratic decision-making processes, collective ownership of property and means of production, egalitarian income, collective distribution of goods, communal kitchen and dining arrangements, equality between the sexes, collective and co-educational education and rejection of the traditional (nuclear) family, rotation of job roles, elimination of status differences between manual and mental labour, and guaranteeing the basic needs of all kibbutz members (food, housing, education and healthcare) were met by the collective.

“The Zionism of the early kibbutzniks had never envisioned a national renewal which could take the forms of the process of state-building” (p. 86). Eretz Israel offered “an opportunity to build an entirely new form of society,” not to bring about a nation-state with a capitalist economy. The focus on founding and defending Israel came later. Horrox uses the example of the anarcho-syndicalist Augustin Souchy (1892-1984), who met Gustav Landauer in Berlin before World War I and travelled to Israel several times after World War II, to illustrate that many non-Jewish anarchists also succumbed to the fascination of the cooperative collective movement. Souchy, who met Martin Buber in Jerusalem and visited numerous kibbutzim, wrote: “My deepest impression […] was the harmonious community life in the kibbutzim. The transformation of desert land into a garden with no prospect of material gain would hardly have been possible under these severe conditions on the basis of private property. But the spirit of community made it happen. What I saw in Israel was the best confirmation for me that my childhood ideal can be realised and that free socialism is not a utopia.”[2]

The history of the Jewish cooperative settlement movement can be divided into four periods. The first, social-utopian period from 1907 to 1935, in which libertarian socialist influences were widespread. The second phase, from 1936 to 1949, is seen as the “heyday” of the kibbutzim. In the years from 1950 to 1966, the cooperative movement lost importance as a result of the founding of the state in 1948 and increasing institutionalisation and party influence. From 1967 to the late 1980s, it went through a period of industrial transformation. At the same time, since the 1970s, among some in the intellectual circles of the kibbutz movement there has been an increased preoccupation “with ideological questions”, a “renewed turn to Buber and Landauer” (p. 88) and to anarchism: “Although it was, by that time, too late to turn back the clock, figures like Landauer again became an intellectual inspiration for many kibbutzniks. The kibbutz movement began to recognise the deep debt it owed to its anarchist predecessors” (p. 89).

The economic crisis in Israel in the 1980s also forced the kibbutzim to make economic adjustments, for example with increasing professionalisation in the areas of management and financial administration. The collectivism of the kibbutzim is still, to this day, suffering as a result. Horrox sees the reasons why the utopia envisaged by many in the kibbutz movement’s founding generation ultimately failed to materialise in the long term in the fact that the “dream of the early communards was systematically manipulated and instrumentalised by the emerging Zionist institutions of a state-in-waiting” (p. 127). The decline of the original libertarian impulses within the kibbutz movement after the founding of the state of Israel did not go unnoticed by Martin Buber either, but at the same time, he remained hopeful for their renewal and resurgence: “In the past, the kibbutz movement had an indirect impact on human coexistence in the city and in rural settlements, and at the same time had a tremendous direct impact on the hearts of young people in the diaspora. This second influence is less profound today, while the first has disappeared altogether. I am far from blaming the people of the kibbutz for this. I know very well the role of the politicisation of our life as well as the growing dependence on the world market etc. Nonetheless, the fact is that I used to feel the power of the actualising spirit and I don’t anymore. But do not think that I am in despair, because I am pinning my hopes on a new kind of dissatisfaction, on an inner change, on a renewal of the kibbutz movement […].”[3]

Although many kibbutzim, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, said goodbye to the “anti-market views of their founding generation” (p. 139), turned away from the idea of ​​socialism and, with the privatisation of the common means of production, oriented themselves more towards capitalism, this, according to Horrox, is by no means the end of this movement. Although the vast majority of today’s kibbutzim “are no longer as close to classic anarchism as they used to be” in terms of their structure and everyday processes, they often “still function in a manner distinct from both capitalist and state-socialist models” (p. 141f.).

In his outlook on the kibbutz movement in the 21st century, Horrox rightly emphasises that even if the “aspirations of the early kibbutz communards have long been integrated into the Zionist state structure”, the “country they helped shape” nevertheless continued to evolve, proving to be “a veritable micro-laboratory for radical social experiments” and thus for options that could open space for a “renewal of the anarchist tradition” (p. 186). How, the author concludes, can the “radical legacy of the country’s history provide answers to current social problems?” (Afterword, 2017, p. 201). His answer is: by “developing realistic alternatives that become a permanent status quo in a spirit of mutual aid, cooperation and self-government.” (ibid.).

James Horrox, Gelebte Revolution. Anarchismus in der Kibbuzbewegung. Übersetzung aus dem Englischen und Französischen (Nachwort von 2017) von Lou Marin. Heidelberg: Graswurzelrevolution, 2021.

_____________

[1] Martin Buber, Der heilige Weg. In: Martin Buber Werkausgabe, Bd. 11.1: Schriften zur politischen Philosophie und zur Sozialphilosophie. Hrsg. u. kommentiert von Stefano Franchini, eingeleitet von Francesco Ferrari. Gütersloh 2019, S. 125-156, hier: S. 152.
[2] Internationales Institut für Sozialgeschichte (IISG) Amsterdam, Augustin Souchy Papers, Nr. 53.
[3] Martin Buber an Jifrach Chaviv vom 22.12.1959. In: Ders., Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten. 3 Bde. Hrsg. u. eingeleitet von Grete Schaeder. Heidelberg 1972-1975, hier: Bd. III, S. 495f.

A little Eden in this world: A Living Revolution review

by Dr. Maurice Schuhmann 

(German original here, published March 21, 2022.)

A few years before his death, the German anarcho-syndicalist Augustin Souchy published a euphoric pamphlet entitled Reise durch die Kibbuzim [Journey Through the Kibbutzim] (1984). In it, he enthusiastically describes the insights and experiences he had gained while traveling through various kibbutzim. His report ends on an emotional and problematic note as follows: “Almost 2000 years ago, the Jews brought Christianity to humanity, unfortunately transplanting the Garden of Eden to the afterlife. Today, the kibbutzim bring at least a little Eden back to this world.” Almost 40 years later, the German translation of the 2009 study A Living Revolution by British political scientist and author James Horrox has now been published.

Although the closeness between the kibbutz movement and anarchism has often been alluded to – especially in the more recent general surveys of anarchism (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible) or in studies of modern anarchism (Uri Gordon, Hier und Jetzt[1]) – with the exception of the abovementioned writings by Souchy, Horrox’s study stands alone.

Starting from a few fundamental remarks on anarchism and Jewish socialism, namely the ideas of A. D. Gordon, an early kibbutznik and leader of the Hapoel Hatzair (Young Worker) movement, in the opening chapters Horrox focuses on the first three Aliyot (waves of Jewish migration to Palestine) in the period between 1882 and 1924. Over the course of the first Aliyah, kvutzot (agricultural collective settlements) were founded, while in the second wave, the kibbutzim developed as an independent form of settlement.

Among the protagonists of the second wave – who created, among other things, the first kibbutz, Degania, which still exists today – the influence of early socialist thinkers, Leo Tolstoy and the theory of Peter Kropotkin was particularly present. In the third – mediated not least by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber – Gustav Landauer’s idea of ​​community gained a stronger foothold. Within the third wave, however, the influence of a Marxist-influenced socialism became stronger, and this spread in the mid-1920s. But Horrox also offers a brief look at the later years and developments that saw the anarchist impulse pushing back in the kibbutzim.

In the almost 15 years between the founding of Degania and the end of the third Aliyah, the kibbutzim functioned on the basis of a socialist way of life. Horrox outlines the foundations of this model, which can still be found in some of today’s kibbutzim, and subsequently brings up the question of a ‘new kibbutz movement’. In presenting how the kibbutz model works, he critically examines the ethos of labour, for example – albeit without problematising the gender-specific distribution of work that existed among the first generation of kibbutzniks – and addresses the pedagogical approaches.

Following on from this, and increasingly drawing on interviews, he sheds light on the relationship that the anarchist movement in Israel has with the kibbutz movement. In doing so, he is forced to conclude that “many of today’s Israeli anarchists no longer have much interest in the experiences of the early communards.”

Horrox’s well-founded presentation of the anarchist tradition within the kibbutz movement offers a very good introduction to the history and early development of this unique community movement, which, in contrast to the mostly short-lived early socialist commune projects of the followers of Cabet, Saint-Simon and Fourier, can look back on more than 100 years of history. Furthermore, Horrox fills a research gap in the otherwise rich literature on this movement by providing a foundation for the postulate of a closeness between anarchist thought and the early kibbutz movement, advocated by Noam Chomsky among others, which often appears in secondary literature.

Horrox’s study is supplemented by several appendices – including a reprint of Nahum Goldman’s correspondence with Gustav Landauer and Uri Gordon's preface to the first American edition.

James Horrox: Gelebte Revolution. Anarchismus in der Kibbuzbewegung. Verlag Graswurzelrevolution, 259 S., br., 24,80 €.

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[1] The title under which the German translation of Gordon’s book Anarchy Alive! was published in 2010.