Murray Bookchin, who died on July 30 at 85, was a protean son of the left whose intellectual hegira took him from Communism through Trotskyism, anarchism and social ecology. It was in the last that he made his most creative contributions, through books such as The Ecology of Freedom (1982). An ideological infighter, Bookchin was appalled by the ideas espoused by followers of deep ecology, accusing them of privileging nature over humanity and of failing to fight the “grow or die” capitalist system. At the time of his death he was working on a magnum opus about the failure of the twentieth-century left–critical to the end.