Janet Biehl is an American political writer who is the author of numerous books and articles associated with social ecology, the body of ideas developed and publicized by Murray Bookchin. Formerly an advocate of his antistatist political program, she broke with it publicly in 2011. She works as a freelance copy editor for book publishers in New York. She currently focuses as well on translating, journalism, and artmaking.
In 1986 she attended the Institute for Social Ecology, in Vermont, where she met the social theorist Murray Bookchin. In January 1987 she moved to Burlington, Vermont, to study further with Bookchin. They began a collaborative relationship to advance and promote social ecology. From 1987 to 2003 they co-wrote and co-published the theoretical newsletter Green Perspectives, later renamed Left Green Perspectives. Biehl edited and compiled The Murray Bookchin Reader, which Bookchin considered to be the best introduction to his work. To summarize Bookchin's ideas on assembly democracy, known as libertarian municipalism, she wrote The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism. She wrote numerous articles about or related to Bookchin's ideas. Since Bookchin's death in 2006, she authored Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin, published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. In 2011 Biehl separated from social ecology, explaining that she could no longer advocate an antistatist ideology. She blogged at Ecology or Catastrophe.
Kurdish freedom movement
Biehl is a supporter of the Kurdish freedom movement. After Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the insurgent Kurdistan Workers' Party, was captured and imprisoned in 1999, he became an avid reader of Bookchin's work in Turkish translation and recommended it to the movement. Drawing on libertarian municipalism, he formulated democratic confederalism as a political program, which the PKK adopted. In 2004 several intermediaries tried to arrange a dialogue between Bookchin and Öcalan but were unsuccessful due to Bookchin's failing health. In 2012 Biehl translated the book Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan by the solidarity group TATORT Kurdistan, a field study of democratic institutions built by the Kurdish movement in southeastern Turkey to implement democratic confederalism. In 2014 and 2015 she visited Rojava, the mostly Kurdish region of northern Syria. There the Kurdish movement is attempting, in wartime conditions, to implement democratic confederalism, gender equality, and ecology. She published several articles about her visits. In October 2016 her translation of Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Northern Syria, written by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboga, was published by Pluto Press. Biehl is currently translating the three-volume memoirs of Sakine Cansiz, a co-founder of the PKK in 1978 and progenitor of today's strong Kurdish women's movement. In the spring of 2019 Biehl returned to Rojava to work on a documentary film. She is currently writing and drawing a graphic novel about Rojava.
