This is a property of type Text.
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Social ecology is a holistic theory dealing with social history, the human species, and our role in the natural world. Its proponents advocate for a restructuring of society from the bottom up, replacing hierarchy, exploitation, and homogenization with communal autonomy, interdependence, and radical ecological humanism. Social ecology is distinctive for its argument in favor of direct democracy as an expression of ecological politics; that direct democracy is “ecological” both in function and form. In this way, social ecologists ultimately view political revolution and ecological evolution as one and the same process. The 20th-century thinker Murray Bookchin dedicated himself to cultivating this perspective for many decades, incorporating elements of dialectical Marxism, classical anarchism, anthropology, urban studies, technology studies, ecological design, and political philosophy. The following entry introduces the background, key themes, and practical examples of this philosophy and then points to several emerging tensions, limits, and opportunities. +
Sociocracy is a governance system designed to guide collective and individual decision-making through shared power, non-coercive processes, and alignment with an organization’s purpose. Originating with Dutch engineer Gerard Endenburg and influenced by Quaker decision-making, pacifism, natural systems, and cybernetics, sociocracy’s core principle is that those doing the work should make the related decisions. Its structure relies on autonomous, interconnected “circles” that hold decision-making authority over specific domains, ensuring that the division of labor aligns with the division of governance. Practices such as double linking between circles and consent-based decision-making create a distributed, non-hierarchical system in which all voices are heard and power is balanced. +
West African Context
People and Language: "Susu" is the name of an ethnic group in West Africa, specifically in parts of Mali, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. It also refers to the Mande language spoken by these people.
Term of Endearment: In some African cultures, "Susu" is a term of endearment, often associated with sweetness or affection, and is used as a nickname for loved ones.
Asian Context
Indonesian Word for Milk: In Indonesian and other Austronesian languages, "susu" is the word for "milk," deriving from Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian roots.
Financial/Social Term
Savings Club: In West Africa and the Caribbean, "susu" refers to an informal cooperative savings scheme or club where members contribute regularly, and the accumulated funds are distributed to members in turn. +
While it has been used in nationalist movements to signify political independence from colonial rule, Gandhi and later thinkers gave it a deeper ethical, social, and ecological meaning: not merely the transfer of power to a state, but the capacity of individuals and communities to govern themselves in harmony with each other and with nature. Swaraj emphasizes autonomy, decentralization, and self-reliance, where villages and local communities become the foundation of democratic life through direct participation, mutual aid, and subsistence-based economies. In this broader sense, Swaraj is both a philosophy of freedom and responsibility, and a practice of reclaiming dignity, justice, and sustainability outside the logics of domination and exploitation. +
T
Ta Madok Maka—translated as “I help you, you help me”—is a core philosophical and moral principle of the Indigenous Karen (K’nyaw) people, embodying reciprocity, mutual respect, and interconnected wellbeing among humans, nature, and the spirit world. +
Tequio is an Indigenous system of collective work in Mexico—especially in Oaxaca—through which members of a community contribute unpaid labour to build, maintain, or repair infrastructure and services that benefit everyone (paths, water systems, schools, plazas, community radios, fiestas, etc.). It is usually obligatory for adult community members, is organized through assemblies and authorities, and is considered both an honour and a civic/communal duty rather than “volunteer work” or a wage relation. +
A greatly honored thimuay is sometimes additionally called a thimuay labi, with the word "labi" simply being a descriptor meaning "highest" or most senior. In predominantly Muslim Subanon communities, the term solotan is sometimes used instead of thimuay. +
Total liberation refers to a radical ethical and political framework that seeks the dismantling of all systems of domination—human over human, human over nonhuman animals, and human over nature. It argues that struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and the state cannot be separated from the struggle against speciesism and ecological destruction, since all are rooted in hierarchical logics of control and exploitation. Total liberation thus calls for an integrated praxis that combines social revolution, ecological defense, and animal liberation, envisioning a world free from oppression in every form. +
U
Uhuru is a Kiswahili word meaning “freedom” or “independence,” and in much of Eastern and Southern Africa it names both a political goal and an unfinished project of decolonization. In the mid-20th century it became a rallying cry for anti-colonial struggles: in Tanganyika/Tanzania in slogans like Uhuru na kazi (“freedom and work”) and Uhuru na Umoja (“freedom and unity”), and in Kenya as shorthand for full political independence and self-rule, later echoed in the naming of places such as Uhuru Park and Uhuru Peak on Kilimanjaro.
Epistemologically, it sits inside wider decolonial projects that challenge Eurocentric definitions of “freedom”: thinkers of African decoloniality and Afro-feminism argue that uhuru involves reclaiming indigenous knowledge systems, gender justice and land-based autonomy, so that freedom is understood not as abstract individual rights alone, but as collective capacity to live, know, and govern otherwise after empire. +
Ujamaa is a Kiswahili term usually translated as “familyhood,” and it names both an ethical principle and a specific project of African socialism associated above all with Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. As a political-economic philosophy, Ujamaa emphasized communal ownership, collective agriculture, social equality, and national self-reliance, crystallized in the 1967 Arusha Declaration and the creation of Ujamaa villages, where rural households were reorganized into cooperative settlements intended to overcome colonial inequalities and build a classless society. +
V
Vernacular: (usually the vernacular) the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region: he wrote in the vernacular to reach a larger audience. +
Z
The term “sacrifice zone” emerged in the 1970s within U.S. land management debates, originally describing the overgrazed, degraded patches around water sources in livestock farming. It gained broader visibility in 1973 when a National Academy of Sciences report applied it to the lasting ecological and social damage of coal strip-mining in the American West. The concept soon entered wider environmental and political discourse, especially during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when policymakers used it to justify local environmental destruction in the name of national energy security. Journalists and activists amplified the term to reveal how certain places—and by extension, their inhabitants—were deemed disposable for the “greater good.” By the 1980s and 1990s, the environmental justice movement embraced “sacrifice zone” to highlight the disproportionate burden borne by communities of color and low-income groups, who faced toxic contamination and pollution from industries. Today, the term is applied more broadly to areas subjected to harmful extractive activities, from fossil fuel production and chemical industries to large-scale renewable energy projects, underscoring the ongoing trade-offs and injustices in the pursuit of economic growth and energy transitions. +