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Green Political Thought

by Andrew Dobson

Routledge, 4th edition, 2007, paperback

Green Political Thought offers an impressively clear and thoughtful introduction to green ideas and to the aims and strategies of the green movement. The book has been revised and updated since its original publication in 1990 to take account of responses to the arguments of the first three editions. Dobson argues forcefully that ecologism should be considered as a distinct political ideology. He discusses the relationship between ecologism and other ideologies, notably socialism and feminism, the distinction between radical and reformist green traditions and how green social change might be brought about.

Praise for Green Political Thought 3rd

"This is the best text yet written on this subject. It is scrupulously clear and unbiased, very readable, and bears throughout the mark of an engaged, lucid intelligence. Green Political Thought combines an empathy towards what Greens are getting at with a hard-headed analysis of their arguments."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"This is a fascinating, albeit disturbing book. If you thought you knew what Green Politics was all about, the arguments it contains will probably come as a surprise. [The author] sets out the arguments in a clear fashion, provides a wide range of sources . . . and, despite being obviously committed to the 'cause', is not afraid to criticise the Green movement's ideas and strategies when necessary."--Talking Politics

Quotes from Green Political Thought 3rd

"In standard political terms and in order to help distinguish ecologism from other political ideologies, it is useful to examine the widespread green claim to 'go beyond' the left-right political spectrum: 'In calling for an ecological, nonviolent, nonexploitative society, the Greens transcend the linear span of left-to-right.' (Spretnak and Capra, 1985). Jonathan Porritt translates this into a transcendence of capitalism and communism and remarks that 'the debate between the protagonists of capitalism and communism is about as uplifting as the dialogue between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.' (Porritt, 1984). The basis for this claim is that from an ecocentric green perspective, the similarities between communism and capitalism can be made to seem greater than their differences:

Both are dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people's needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance. (Porritt, 1984)

"The name generally given to this way of life is 'industrialism,' which Porritt goes so far as to call a 'super-ideology' within which communism and capitalism are inscribed, and which he describes elsewhere as 'adherence to the belief that human needs can only be met through the permanent expansion of the process of production and consumption.' (in Goldsmith and Hildyard, 1986). This observation is central to green ideology, pointing up both the focus of attack on contemporary politics and society-- industrialism--and the claim that ecologism calls into question assumptions which we have lived for at least two centuries."

"There is now a perfectly respectable claim to be made that green politics can be a part of a technological, affluent, service society. . . . This is the green politics of carbon dioxide scrubbers on industrial chimneys, CFC-free aerosols and car exhausts fitted with catalytic converters. . . . In this guise, green politics presents no sort of a challenge at all to the late-twentieth-century consensus over the desirability of affluent, technological, service societies. But my understanding of the historical significance of radical green politics is that it constitutes precisely such a challenge, . . . It is in these terms that I see green politics in this book; first, so as to keep a fuller picture of the movement in mind than is presently the case; second, to understand better the challenge that it presents to the dominant consensus; and third, to establish ecologism as a political ideology in its own right."

"[M]any of the proposals for change . . . ask us to alter our behaviour at particular points in our daily life and then allow us back on the unsustainable rampage. There is nothing inherently green, for example, in green consumerism, . . . . It is true that consumer pressure helped bring about a reduction in the use of CFCs in aerosol sprays. It is true that the Body Shop will supply you with exotic perfumes and shampoos in reusable bottles and that have not been tested on animals. It is true that we can help extend the life of tropical rainforests by resisting the temptation to buy mahogany toilet seats. None of these activities should be belittled as actions to help save the environment, and they are particularly important in that they show it is possible to do something. However, the consumer strategy is arguably counter-productive at a deeper level of green analysis.

"First, it does nothing to confront the central green point that unlimited production and consumption--no matter how environmentally friendly--is impossible to sustain in a limited system. . . . The Body Shop strategy is a hymn to consumption: in their contribution to the Friends of the Earth Green Consumer Week leaflet . . . they urge people to 'wield their purchasing power responsibly' rather than to wield it less often. . . . Second, it has been pointed out that 'there are masses of people who are disenfranchised from this exercise of power by virtue of not having the money to spend in the first place' . . . . Third, parts of the green movement feel consumerism to be too grubby and materialistic a means to lead us reliably to the stated end of a society of 'voluntary simplicity'. . . . Once more we are forced to recognize the difference between environmentalism and ecologism: the strategy of green consumerism, in its call for change substantially in line with present strategies based on unlimited production and consumption, is a child of the former rather than the latter."

"So radical greens read off three principal features of the limits to growth message and subscribe to them and their implications wholeheartedly: technological solutions cannot help realize the impossible dream of infinite growth in a finite system; the exponential nature of that growth both founds its unsustainability and suggests that the limits to growth may become visible rather quicker than we might think; and the immense complexity of the global system leads greens to suggest that our present attempts to deal with environmental problems are both clumsy and superficial."

"There is now a perfectly respectable claim to be made that green politics can be a part of a technological, affluent, service society--a part, in other words, of Marien's dominant version of what post-industrial society both is and might be like. This is the green politics of carbon dioxide scrubbers on industrial chimneys, CFC-free aerosols and car exhausts fitted with catalytic converters.

"In this guise, green politics presents no sort of a challenge at all to the twenty-first century consensus over the desirability of affluent, technological, service societies. But my understanding of the historical significance of radical green politics is that it constitutes precisely such a challenge, and that we shall lose sight of that significance if we conceive of it only in its reformist mode: a mode that reinforces affluence and technology rather than calling them into question. Radical green politics is far more a friend of the subordinate interpretation of post-industrialism --a decentralized economy following in the wake of a failed industrialism--than of its dominant counterpart. Jonathan Porritt and Nicholoas Winner assert that: "the most radical [green aim] seeks nothing less than a nonviolent revolution to overthrow our whole polluting, plundering and materialistic industrial society and, in its place, to create a new economic and social order which will allow human beings to live in harmony with the planet. In those terms, the Green Movement lays claim to being the most radical and important political and cultural force since the birth of socialism."

"It is in these terms that I see green politics in this book; first, so as to keep a fuller picture of the movement in mind that is presently the case; second, to understand better the challenge that it presents to the dominant consensus; and third, to establish ecologism as a political ideology in its own right.

"In a sense Porritt and Winner do the movement a disfavour by likening the profundity of its challenge to that of early socialism. Much of socialism's intellectual work at least, had already been done by the time it came on the scene. Liberal theorists had long since laid the ground for calls of liberty and equality, and socialism's job was to pick up and reconstitute the pieces created by liberalism's apparent failure to turn theory into practice. In this sense, the radical wing of the green movement is in a position more akin to that of the early liberals than of the early socialists--it is self-consciously seeking to call into question an entire world-view rather than tinker with one that already exists.

"In standard political terms and in order to help distinguish ecologism from other political ideologies, it is useful to examine the widespread green claim to 'go beyond' the left-right political spectrum: 'In calling for an ecological, nonviolent, nonexploitative society, the Greens transcend the linear span of left-to-right.' (Spretnak and Capra, 1985). Jonathan Porritt translates this into a transcendence of capitalism and communism and remarks that 'the debate between the protagonists of capitalism and communism is about as uplifting as the dialogue between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.' (Porritt, 1984). The basis for this claim is that from an ecocentric green perspective, the similarities between communism and capitalism can be made to seem greater than their differences:

"Both are dedicated to industrial growth, to the expansion of the means of production, to a materialist ethic as the best means of meeting people's needs, and to unimpeded technological development. Both rely on increasing centralization and large-scale bureaucratic control and co-ordination. From a viewpoint of narrow scientific rationalism, both insist that the planet is there to be conquered, that big is self-evidently beautiful, and that what cannot be measured is of no importance. (Porritt, 1984)

"The name generally given to this way of life is 'industrialism,' which Porritt goes so far as to call a 'super-ideology' within which communism and capitalism are inscribed, and which he describes elsewhere as 'adherence to the belief that human needs can only be met through the permanent expansion of the process of production and consumption.' (in Goldsmith and Hildyard, 1986). This observation is central to green ideology, pointing up both the focus of attack on contemporary politics and society-- industrialism--and the claim that ecologism calls into question assumptions which we have lived for at least two centuries." Ecologists . . . point out that industrialism suffers from the contradiction of undermining the very context in which it is possible, by unsustainable consuming a finite stock of resources in a world that does not have a limitless capacity to absorb the waste produced by the industrial process.

In some respects we can talk of the green movement quite happily in terms of left and right because the terms we use to discuss the difference between the two can easily be applied to it. If, for example, we take equality and hierarchy as characteristics held to be praiseworthy within left-wing and right-wing thought respectively, then ecologism is clearly left-wing, arguing as it does for forms of equality among human beings and between human beings and other species. However, to argue that ecologism is unequivocally left-wing is not so easy. For instance, green politics is in principle averse to anything but the most timid engineering of the social and natural world by human beings. Since the French Revolution, it has been a theme of left-wing thought that the existence of a concrete natural order of things with which human beings should conform and not tamper is a form of medieval mumbo-jumbo used by the right to secure and ossify privilege. The left has consistently argued that the world is there to be remade in the image of 'man' (usually) in accordance with plans drawn up by 'men' (usually), and in which the only reference to a natural order is to an abstract one outside of time and place.

The radical green aspiration to insert the human being in its "proper place' in the natural order and to generate a sense of humility in the face of it is clearly 'right-wing' in this context.

Ecologists can only perversely be accused of using this idea to preserve wealth and privilege, but the understanding of the place of the human being in a pre-ordained and immensely complex world with which we meddle at our peril is nevertheless a right-wing thought. Joe Weston, writing from a socialist perspective, puts it like this: "Clearly the green analysis of environmental and social issues is within the broad framework of right-wing ideology and philosophy. The belief in 'natural' limits to human achievement, the denial of class divisions and the Romantic view of 'nature' all have their roots in the conservative and liberal political divisions." (Weston, 1986) . . .

[T] green claim to transcend capitalism and communism, in the sense that ecologism calls into question an overriding feature common to them both (industrialism), has drawn heavy criticism from the left. . . . . For socialists there is no more important political battle to be fought than that between capital and labour; and any politics that claims to transcend this battle is regarded with suspicion. The idea that the interests of capital and labour have somehow converged amounts to a betrayal, from the socialist point of view, of the project to liberate labour from capital. The interests of capital and labour are not the same, yet the green belief that both are inscribed in the super-ideology of industrialism makes it seem as though they are.

At root, proposes Joe Weston, the green movement's mistake is to refuse a class analysis of society--it 'argues that traditional class divisions are at an end" and uses the concept "industrial society--to distinguish contemporary society from orthodox capitalism; . . . " From Weston's point of view it is no accident, therefore, that the green movement's 'industrialism' thesis, kept company by the abandonment of a class analysis of society, also results in a political practice based around the pressure groups of pluralism. In this sense, there is no difference between Daniel Bell and Jonathan Porritt. In the first place, Porritt's attack on industrialism prevents him from seeing that the real problem is capitalism; second; his failure to subscribe to a class analysis of society him to the dead-end of pressure-group politics; and third--and probably most serious from a socialist point of view--no only is he not attacking capitalism as he should, but he is contributing to its survival by deflecting criticism from it.

So the left's belief that it is not possible to transcend capitalism while capitalism still exists makes it suspicious of claims to the contrary.

[A] foundation-stone of radical green politics is the belief that our finite Earth places limits on industrial growth. This finitude, and the scarcity it implies, is an article of faith for green ideologues, and it provides the fundamental framework within which any putative picture of a green society must be drawn. . . .

We now have the fundamentals of ecologism in place. We have discussed its critique of contemporary society, we have outlined its proposals for an ecologically sound society, and we have assessed its approach to bringing such a society about. I have claimed that ecologism is a new political ideology, worthy of attention in the new millennium alongside other more familiar ones such as liberalism, conservatism and socialism. ... [It] is only natural to want to compare and contrast this new ideology with those which it seeks to challenge.

Socialism

In the context of socialism and the largely successful assault launched on it by the right over the past twenty years, the last thing socialism needed, so the argument goes, was challenge to its hegemony toward the left-hand end of the political spectrum. Early responses to the environmental movement from the socialist left were certainly hostile and often focused on its middle-class nature, either so as to illustrate its marginal relevance to the working class in particular and thus to socialism in general, or , more aggressively, to cast it in the role of a positive distraction from the fundamental battles still to be fought between capital and labour. Either way, the nascent green movement was generally presented as a blip on the screen of radical politics, which would, probably, soon disappear and which, certainly, had nothing to say to the left that was worth listening to.

In the pages that follow I shall set out what I consider to be the principal socialist criticisms of green politics, and then show the ways in which socialists sensitive to the ecologocial position have reinterpreted their own tradition so as to accommodate it.

A third fault line between socialists and political ecologists can be found in disputes over the issue of limits to growth. Indeed, the most instructive test to carry out on would-be green socialists is to see how far they have accepted the fundamental green position that there are material limits to productive growth. Some have done so completely and in the process would appear significantly to have reassessed the content of their socialism. Rudolf Bahro, for example, commented when he was still a socialist that he found it 'quite atrocious that there are marxists who contest the finite scope of the earth's exploitable crust' (1982) We now know that Bahro's dwelling on thoughts like this led him to abandon socialism entirely.

[A]cceptance of the green position that there are limits to productive growth can have considerable repercussions with respect to the content of the socialism espoused by socialists. One of the repercussions that stand out is a rethinking of the socialist tradition itself in the sense of a stressing of some aspects of it at the expense of others. Not surprisingly, it is decentralist, non-bureaucratic, non-productivist socialism to which writers like Williams most often refer, and the Utopian socialists and William Morris are those usually resurrected as evidence for its existence.

Table of Contents of Green Political Thought 3rd

1. THINKING ABOUT ECOLOGISM
   Sustainable societies
   Reasons to care for the environment
   Crisis and its political-strategic consequences
   Universality and social change
   Lessons from nature
   Left and right: communism and capitalism
   Historical specificity
   Conclusion
   
2. PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS
   The Gaia hypothesis
   Ethics: a code of conduct
   Ethics: a state of being
   Anthropocentrism
   
3. THE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
   Limits to growth
   Possible positions
   More problems with growth
   Questioning consumption
   Energy
   Trade and travel
   Work
   Bioregionalism
   Agriculture
   Diversity
   Decentralization and its limits
   
4. STRATEGIES FOR GREEN CHANGE
   Democracy and authoritarianism
   Action through and around the legislature
   Lifestyle
   Communities
   Direct action
   Class
   Conclusion
   
5. ECOLOGISM AND OTHER IDEOLOGIES
   Liberalism
   Conservatism
   Socialism
   Feminism

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