When ecological activists talk about direct action on behalf of the environment, more often than not what comes to mind are actions to save the ancient forest, efforts to stop whaling or strategies to confront the nuclear crisis. But there is another tradition of environmental direct action as well, one too often ignored - direct action in the urban environment. Ecological issues in the city are not confined to concerns about air quality, water pollution or traffic congestion. Urban ecology concerns itself with the environment where people live, the point where the natural world melds into the built environment.

The urban environment of the inner city is a world of concrete, vacant lots and abandoned buildings, a place where human needs intersect with the realities of capitalism. The relationships of domination and oppression, the human hierarchies that are the hallmark of capitalism, are nowhere more starkly on display than in the urban environment. When working on ecological issues in the urban context, activists need to expand our definition of what constitutes an ecological issue. We need to apply the kind of holistic thinking that is the great strength of an ecological perspective to the built environments that constitute, for the most part, the ecology of the city. In the urban environment all of the elements of non-human nature are conditioned by the artifacts and artifice of humanity. And if there is a place where humanity most appears to have achieved domination over the rest of nature, it is in the city. Cities must be understood ecologically, as complex organisms or ecosystems, places where non-human and human nature intersect. When we speak of the urban environment we must include those elements of the city which seem, in some ways, the antithesis of nature.

Therefore our approach to movement building in the city must, if it is to be effective, be ecological on at least three interrelated levels. First of all we must develop an ecological analysis of urban problems. We must be holistic in our thinking and recognize the connections between seemingly disparate issues like housing, education, water pollution, health care, economics, violence, solid waste and food security. All of these issues, and others, are symptomatic of a deeper malaise, one that is systemic in nature and rooted in institutions and attitudes predicated on hierarchy and domination. We need to recognize that our futile attempts to dominate nature are outgrowths of the human relationships of domination that give structure to the culture of capitalism. The rule of rich over poor, men over women, whites over people of color, and heterosexuals over gays creates what Murray Bookchin terms, "an epistemology of rule," which is a precondition for the attempt to dominate the rest of the natural world.

A second criteria of an effective urban environmental movement requires that we expand our understanding of what constitutes the urban environment and include issues like housing, open space and community economic development. Millions of people live everyday in environments that constitute a direct threat to the health and safety of their inhabitants. The creation of decent, affordable and energy-efficient housing is an ecological issue of the highest magnitude. The empowerment of communities to make crucial decisions about the placement of incinerators or sewage treatment plants, to make determinations about how to use vacant lots or abandoned buildings are all ecological issues too.

Community empowerment must be the starting point of effective ecological organizing in the city. In the process of achieving such empowerment, we need to develop strategies that combine protest, direct action and ecological reconstruction. A movement opposing further degradation of the urban environment is necessary but insufficient. We also need to take direct action to physical reconstruct urban communities along ecological lines. Vacant lots must be recreated as gardens and parks, and abandoned buildings must be reinhabited. Environmental justice must expand its focus beyond the prevention of toxic dumping and opposition to incineration, by incorporating issues of justice that relate to the conditions of everyday life and must expand our understanding of what constitutes direct action. In the urban setting, it means the seizure of vacant properties and their development through the efforts of the people who will make use of them.

There is a long tradition in this country and throughout Europe and Latin America of urban squatting and urban gardening. In the 19970's, I had the opportunity to work in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York's Lower East Side, where the community, through a network of grassroots organizations, began to take control of its physical space. People used a process known as sweat equity urban homesteading to seize abandoned buildings and rebuild them as low-income housing cooperatives. Sweat equity means people use their own labor as the source of capital needed to rehabilitate the abandoned buildings. In the process people not only built decent housing for themselves but also learned energy-efficient building techniques and made use of solar energy and wind power.

These were ecological projects. They focused on the physical environment of the neighborhood, they took an environmental problem (abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn vacant lots) and turned them into a resource for the community (decent, energy efficient low-income housing and community parks and gardens). Projects of this sort are usually an overlooked aspect of the movement for environmental justice. They are an example of direct action and community empowerment that is well expressed by the motto of Charas, one of the groups involved in these projects, "Doing more with less."

The MOVE organization in Philadelphia represents another example of this approach to transforming the urban environment. They tried to introduce natural processes into the city, such as composting and other forms of natural living, and were bombed by the Philadelphia police for their trouble. Until the ecology movement comes to terms with issues of importance to inner city people, it will remain a predominantly white, middle-class movement. We must embrace these urban issues and give them the same kind of attention we give to saving the redwoods, the rainforest or endangered species.

The bulk of the world's population lives in cities. While the deep ecologists' call to abandon cites and live as hunters and gatherers makes for beautiful poetry, the social consequences of such development, the human suffering that would be engendered, would be horrific indeed. We cannot turn our backs on 80 percent of the population of the Unites States, nor on ten thousand years of cultural evolution. We can, however, ecologize our cities. Social ecology suggests that we must do just that.

An urban ecology movement must be rooted in a set of principles that reflect our understanding of tendencies in non-human nature which inform a social ecology; the movement must combine a concern with environmental justice with a call for social justice. The two are really inseparable, and one cannot be achieved without the other. The movement must be non-hierarchical, mutualistic and must incorporate the principles of diversity, spontaneity and homeostasis. From the perspective of social ecology, these principles derived from our observation and analysis of non-human nature must inform any attempt at ecological activism in the urban environment. Ultimately our direct action in urban reconstruction must be linked to a political strategy like libertarian municipalism, which would create neighborhood assemblies as the participatory, democratic means for governing our neighborhoods and communities. A combination of grassroots, ecologically oriented community development and this new approach to politics represent our best hope for achieving environmental and social justice.