Green Politics

Deforestation. Acid rain. Ozone depletion. Pesticide poisoning. Genetically modified food, and of course, Global Warming. These are the issues that invigorated political life in the late twentieth century and will continue to do so in the twenty-first. This is an extraordinary circumstance and it has happened extraordinarily quickly. Even thirty years ago, the development of a political movement around these issues would have been unimaginable.

Knowledge of some of them - pesticide poisoning, for example, was restricted to a few scientists and even fewer social commentators, and there was no knowledge at all of others, such as global warming. Now it would be hard to find anyone in the ‘developed’ world who has never heard of these environmental problems, and probably even harder to find anyone in the ‘developing’ world who would not accept that environmental decay was either a cause or a symptom of their social, political and economic difficulties. Upon this realization, in both the North and the South, a vibrant environmental movement has been built: a movement which now has an influential presence both in civil society and in the more formal political world of parliamentary politics.

This movement has given rise to a veritable academic industry designed to analyse it, and this analysis takes many forms. There are books and articles devoted to green political parties, to environmental policy-making, to the sociology of the environmental movement, and to international environmental treaty-making. There are also books devoted to discussing and analysing the political and social ideas that lie behind the environmental movement, and this is one of those books. My principal objective is to describe and assess that set of ideas regarding the environment which can properly be regarded as an ideology, the ideology of ecologism.

In terms of human relationships with the non-human natural world, ecologism asks that the onus of justification be shifted from those who counsel as little inference as possible with the non-human natural world to those who believe that interference is essentially non-problematic. Environmentalists will usually be concerned about intervention only as far as it might affect human beings; ecologists will argue that the strong anthropocentrism that this betrays is far more a part of our current problems than a solution to them.

Practical considerations of limits to growth and ethical concerns about the non-human natural world combine to produce, in ecologism, a political ideology in its own right. We can call it an ideology (in the functional sense) because it has, first, a description of the political and social world—a pair of green spectacles—which helps us to find our way around it. It also has a programme for political change and, crucially, it has a picture of the kind of society that ecologists think we ought to live in. A society in which there is perfect harmony between us and nature.