The facts regarding climate change in particular, and environmental degradation in general, will be over-familiar to many people by now. You cannot turn on the radio without hearing another feature about ‘the environment’. Paradoxically, and despite the best efforts of the Green Party and the usual pressure groups, ‘green issues’ had little or no presence within the recent general election campaign in the UK. The Green Party’s results were, to be charitable, patchy and showed little prospect of the requisite, urgent quantum leap in electoral performance. When confronted with the real prospect of irreversible and ecological (and therefore social and economic) calamity within the next thirty years, it is surely time to urgently review our approach.
All environmentalists are exasperated by the intransigence of government and corporations when faced with the demands of ecological crisis. Why can’t they act, even in their own interests? Perhaps we are failing to recognise that that such institutions, as products of industrial society, are intrinsically deleterious to Nature, hence their present paralysis. They cannot be sufficiently reformed without transforming them completely.
Understandably, this has encouraged a view that we must take control of the situation. Unlike socialists, we cannot attempt to coral the working class to do our dirty work for us (although I suspect quite a few die-hard socialists have mistaken our radical agenda for their own) so we have entered into the fray of national, adversarial politics. The problem is: environmentalism is, by it’s nature, neither adversarial, national and, I will suggest, political in any conventional sense. I feel the utopian ideological misapprehensions that suggest parliamentary democracy is capable of delivering change, or that other political parties might be amenable to our influence, has lead us into a political cul de sac and has allowed green thinking to become marginal rather than fundamental. Nature has become ‘the environment’ (something out there, remote) and her crisis mere ‘green issues’. Our present course runs the risk of merely confusing, exhausting and demoralising our core support. It may be unpalatable, but I have to suggest to you that green politics isn’t working.
To revive it, I believe we must unravel our present philosophical and ideological contradictions. Not to be clever or purist but to ensure that our personal/natural resources are used with maximum efficiency. That means not using party politics as a substitute for real change. We must engage with people’s real selves not their political prejudices. As I’ve already indicated, conventional politics thrives upon finding someone to blame. Or identifying someone, anyone, to be the agency of social change. Except oneself. The real news is that the agency of change from our environmental perspective is, unavoidably, oneself!
Let’s set aside the fact that engaging in parliamentary democracy may not just be ineffective but profoundly retrograde environmentally. What case can be made for personal change as the agency of meaningful social change, or to paraphrase Gandhi, being the change you wish to see in society? I think we must start by recognising that there can be no meaningful distinction between the individual and nature. Conventional conceptual barriers like our skin, or the walls of our homes are fine if you want to, say, bury your waste ‘out there’ and forget about it, but are dissolved by ecological understanding. This explains why your mental and physical health are not contingent upon the environment, they are the environment.
These observations give some idea of how much traction exists between you and the environment. The way you conduct your life is, therefore, not only important, but hugely transformative. For example (and I realise these are contentious examples) if every Green Party member gave up their car(s), air travel and became vegan tomorrow I would suggest that the net environmental benefit would, overnight, outweigh everything achieved by the Green Party to date. Moreover, our arguments for real progress would be hugely more convincing if we were radically walking the walk as well as talking the talk. We could develop a transformative community which demonstrated the enormous personal and social benefits of living as part of nature: it is no coincidence that industrial society has gone to great lengths to disrupt the simple but potent synergy between human beings and nature. I suspect we all know what we need to do – this is the time to act. Politics should be the cart not the horse.
All environmentalists are exasperated by the intransigence of government and corporations when faced with the demands of ecological crisis. Why can’t they act, even in their own interests? Perhaps we are failing to recognise that that such institutions, as products of industrial society, are intrinsically deleterious to Nature, hence their present paralysis. They cannot be sufficiently reformed without transforming them completely.
Understandably, this has encouraged a view that we must take control of the situation. Unlike socialists, we cannot attempt to coral the working class to do our dirty work for us (although I suspect quite a few die-hard socialists have mistaken our radical agenda for their own) so we have entered into the fray of national, adversarial politics. The problem is: environmentalism is, by it’s nature, neither adversarial, national and, I will suggest, political in any conventional sense. I feel the utopian ideological misapprehensions that suggest parliamentary democracy is capable of delivering change, or that other political parties might be amenable to our influence, has lead us into a political cul de sac and has allowed green thinking to become marginal rather than fundamental. Nature has become ‘the environment’ (something out there, remote) and her crisis mere ‘green issues’. Our present course runs the risk of merely confusing, exhausting and demoralising our core support. It may be unpalatable, but I have to suggest to you that green politics isn’t working.
To revive it, I believe we must unravel our present philosophical and ideological contradictions. Not to be clever or purist but to ensure that our personal/natural resources are used with maximum efficiency. That means not using party politics as a substitute for real change. We must engage with people’s real selves not their political prejudices. As I’ve already indicated, conventional politics thrives upon finding someone to blame. Or identifying someone, anyone, to be the agency of social change. Except oneself. The real news is that the agency of change from our environmental perspective is, unavoidably, oneself!
Let’s set aside the fact that engaging in parliamentary democracy may not just be ineffective but profoundly retrograde environmentally. What case can be made for personal change as the agency of meaningful social change, or to paraphrase Gandhi, being the change you wish to see in society? I think we must start by recognising that there can be no meaningful distinction between the individual and nature. Conventional conceptual barriers like our skin, or the walls of our homes are fine if you want to, say, bury your waste ‘out there’ and forget about it, but are dissolved by ecological understanding. This explains why your mental and physical health are not contingent upon the environment, they are the environment.
These observations give some idea of how much traction exists between you and the environment. The way you conduct your life is, therefore, not only important, but hugely transformative. For example (and I realise these are contentious examples) if every Green Party member gave up their car(s), air travel and became vegan tomorrow I would suggest that the net environmental benefit would, overnight, outweigh everything achieved by the Green Party to date. Moreover, our arguments for real progress would be hugely more convincing if we were radically walking the walk as well as talking the talk. We could develop a transformative community which demonstrated the enormous personal and social benefits of living as part of nature: it is no coincidence that industrial society has gone to great lengths to disrupt the simple but potent synergy between human beings and nature. I suspect we all know what we need to do – this is the time to act. Politics should be the cart not the horse.
It has become apparent to me that the necessary changes to people’s lives in order to salvage our future on this planet could never be imposed from above without creating a monstrous, Stalinist regime. This would obviously be completely self-defeating. If we can reveal the future through our lives today, there is still the prospect of our own freedom and meaningful social transformation.
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