James C. Scott, author of Seeing Like a State. I highly recommend it if you're interested in environmental history or the evils that have come from elaborate central planning and utopian schemes.

Awesome, I'll have to check him out!

One conclusion I have come to in regards to anarchy is that due to the fundamentally open and decentralized nature of anarchist political strategizing, it's generally a better plan from a pragmatic anarchist standpoint to encourage dropping out of the system.

Absolutely. By dropping out of the system we can focus all our energy on building the new one, rather than trying to make tweaks to the old. Plus, it's just so much more fun to be playing around in that sandbox of free creation and imagination than inside of the strict rules of someone else's game, trying to change it.

Political opponents of anarchists are just as able to use strategies dreamt up by anarchists as the anarchists are, often with more funding and political machinery behind it, giving them a definite edge.

Ya, inside the political game, it's going to be pretty tough to keep up with entrenched, professional, generations-embedded players of the game. This is literally what they spend their lives doing, and their resources & networks are all focused around this game, so coming in as a newcomer, with less money, talking about ending the game sure puts one at quite a disadvantage.