Bookchin came to see that such relationships were not simply economic but were based on status, that they involved for instance the domination of women by men, of people of colour by whites. Anarchism is concerned to oppose the one basic concept of authority as such. The idea of the domination of nature, said Bookchin, is a projection of human domination onto the natural world, and the ecological crisis has its origins in a social crisis. To resolve the ecological problems we have to look within our own society. His point was that before we can eliminate antagonisms between human societies and the natural world we must first eliminate antagonisms between human beings.
Human inequality is at the root of the biospheric degradation of today.
The rivalry was between the big business firms in the United States and between the EEC, America and Japan. At the Earth Summit big business would dictate terms to the world's government. The individuals who manage these firms are not people with bad intentions, but are locked into a system, and the system has to be changed. By that he did not mean communes or food co-operatives which could not challenge the giant corporations. He had used the term participatory democracy, but he did not mean what John Major meant when he talked about 'empowering the citizens of Britain'.