Does social Ecology have its origins with Murray Bookchin? If I google the term the first thing I get is that it was founded by Bookchin, yet I am reading a book at the moment that proclaims to be from a social ecology perspective except it never makes one mention of Bookchin, and instead attributes its origins to 'the school of social ecology in Vienna'.
A quick check on Wiki also gives you two options for social ecology, the philosophy associated with Bookchin and the academic field that again doesn't mention Bookchin, so I am wondering if there are any major differences between the two, if the later academic version is at all radical in both an anti-capitalist & anti-statist sense and why Bookchin seems to be getting ignored.
Also what do you all make of Bookchin's social ecology anyway, I mean do you find It useful or is there a better way of viewing ecological problems?
The two are definitely not
The two are definitely not the same, and has nothing to do with each other.
Just stick to the first one.
There is much in common
There is much in common between the aspirations expressed by Social Ecologists such as Murray Bookchin (and promoted by the New Compass website for instance) and many other libertarian communists. But they have a dogmatic attachment to their 'libertarian municipalism' as the claimed strategy that would deliver us from capitalism which rejects any modern class struggle based analysis whether derived from either anarchism or marxism. This approach suffers from much the same democratic formalism as those other tendencies advocating 'Participatory Democracy' and 'Inclusive Democracy' that we have criticised elsewhere on this site. Their practical everyday political activity tends as a result to lapse into a form of radical social democracy.
See also this: http://libcom.org/library/municipalization-murray-bookchin