Ecolibrium: The Sunday Serminars, Raps on the Ecol-Warrior Politics for Dismantling the Death Culture & Mobilizing for a Sane Society

A collection of transcribed question-and-answer sessions with countercultural philosopher, writer, musician, and communalist Wulf Zendik (1920-1999), founder with Arol Wulf of the community that eventually became known as Zendik Farm. Founded in Southern California in 1969 and subsequently established at a succession of locations around the country, the Zendik community combined communal living, radical environmentalism, artistic production, and an idiosyncratic spiritual philosophy called Ecolibrium. During its Topanga period in the early 1980s the group became particularly active as a publisher, producing magazines and other literature that members distributed publicly; contemporary and later accounts characterize Zendik's project as an attempt to construct an alternative culture based upon ecological balance, cooperation, creativity, and rejection of consumer society. The Sunday Serminars, recorded during 1983 and 1984, provide an extensive exposition of Zendik's philosophy, which portrays modern industrial society as a destructive "Death Culture" governed by consumerism, competition, hierarchy, alienated labor, environmental exploitation, and received social and religious conventions. Against it he proposes Ecolibrium-a holistic philosophy based on what he calls "Cosmic Responsibility," extending moral responsibility beyond humanity to animals, plants, the earth and ultimately the cosmos. He maintains that humanity must abandon its anthropocentric conception of nature and reorganize economic, political, sexual, spiritual, and communal life around ecological survival. His thought mixes environmental radicalism, anarchistic and anti-authoritarian impulses, metaphysics, communalism, sexual liberation, anti-consumerism, and an almost mystical reverence for nature, while remaining suspicious of established religion, conventional politics, capitalism and communism alike. Newsprint, photo-illustrated wrappers (10 ¾" x 8 ¼"), rear cover illustration, 48 pp. A near fine copy. Two copies located in OCLC.…