GREEN POLITICS TODAY

Green Politics Today

Green Politics Today

Introduction

Ecopolitics, more commonly known as “environmental” or “green politics,” is, along with feminism, the newest political ideology and associated social and political movements of the postwar era. One finds in green politics an extremely broad understanding of the scope of “politics” and the “political” that encompasses almost everything one does, including one's choices about consumption, transport, waste, fertility, food, job, and so on. Often these are presented in such broad terms that they can be viewed as “pre-political” or as simply too big, urgent, and important for normal “politics.” This is presented in either the sense that green politics is about issues of ecological survival that make “politics” irrelevant or that the real “cause” of the ecological crisis is “beyond politics” and has to do with “deeper” dynamics of the ecologically destructive consciousness and ignorance of humanity and/or the spiritual malaise of modernity. Greens thus vacillate between a “common sense” account of politics as the dirty machinations for state power and thus to be avoided and one in which “politics” is an all-encompassing facet of life (Paterson, 1996: 98-132).

Anti-Political Element

In part, this neglect is also because of the “neither left nor right” element in green movements, which is “anti-political” and eschews serious discussion of central elements of politics in favor of ideological exhortations concerning the “common interests of humanity”—humans should be seen not so much as citizens, workers, etc., but as “plain members” of the “land community,” according to A. Leopold. Greens are thus, for the most part, instinctive global thinkers, and “think globally, act locally” has become one of their best-known catchphrases. But this naïve exhortation concerning common global interests has been progressively harder to sustain. In green theory, there has thus been a loss of innocence marked by a stepping back from an anarchist rejection of the state. As R. Grove-White argues, modern environmentalism needs to be seen as having evolved not only as a response to the damaging impacts of specific industrial and social practices but also, more fundamentally, as a social expression of cultural tensions surrounding the underlying ontologies and epistemologies that have led to such trajectories in modern societies (Barry, 2007: 56-89).

Features

Green politics has some unique features compared with nongreen conceptions of politics, some of which are outlined below. The first issue concerns the temporal frame of green politics: as expressed in its central concern with ecological sustainability and sustainable development, it suggests the integration of a concern for the future and for future generations. From a green political point of view, the future needs to be included as an explicit, rather than implicit, dimension of contemporary politics to ensure decisions today do not detrimentally affect those yet to be born. The second issue has to do with the fact that ecological problems do not respect national or cultural boundaries. This is an issue of scale. Pollution problems—such as, most dramatically, climate change—are transnational and global in scope. Thus politics and thinking and acting politically must also be transnational ...