This workshop will introduce participants to Social Ecology, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding people's relationship to nature from historical, contemporary, and future-oriented perspectives. Social Ecology offers a critical view of current ecological problems and presents a praxis that can help us to reharmonize people and nature through principled direct action and a reconstructive political perspective that emphasizes non-hierarchical forms of organization. The ideas of Social Ecology have helped to inform a range of social movements from the Anti-Nuke movement of the 70s, the environmental justice movement, eco-feminism, anti-geo organizing, anti-globalization moralizations, and Occupy Wall Street to the current movement for climate justice.

Dan Chodorkoff holds a Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology and co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974. He is the author of The Anthropology of Utopia, and the novels Loisaida, and Sugaring Down.