Ecology is the scientific study of how organisms and their environment interact. Over the last 50 or so years, increasing concern about human impact on the natural world has given rise to a political ecologism, known as Green politics. Among its main concerns are: climate change and global warming, pollution, acid rain, the impact of nuclear and fossil fuel energy, and loss of species. Green politics is a political ideology that seeks to create an ecologically sustainable society and is rooted in environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and grassroots democracy. It emerged as a visible movement during the 1970s, and in 1979 the German Green Party (die Grünen) launched. Greens are generally to the left of the political spectrum. The movement shares links with other social and political movements such as feminism and the peace movement. Similarly, many political movements have developed environmental strands, for instance ecofeminism and eco-anarchism, and in the face of increasing environmental concern, so have most major political parties.
Inspired by books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the Green or environmental movement originated in grassroots activism. From this emerged a number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which have campaigned around various environmental issues, raising awareness and influencing organizations and policy. They include Friends of the Earth, which was launched in 1969 and today has 2 million activists in 73 countries, and Greenpeace, which emerged in 1971 and is known for its sometimes controversial dramatic direct actions. Because environmental issues are huge and often global, activists in the early days of the Green movement adopted the slogan ‘think globally, act locally’. As a result, local grassroots activism continues to play a significant role in Green politics, focusing on issues such as fracking, GM crops and road building. While Green activism is now worldwide, Green political parties have struggled to enter mainstream politics. Even so, in 2009 there were 46 Green MEPs in the European parliament, and the UK elected its first Green MP in 2010.
Pollution, climate change and global warming
One of the Green movement’s great successes has been to put environmental concerns onto national and international political agendas. However, raising issues and achieving change are two different matters, partly because tackling global warming, climate change and pollution is seen as having potentially damaging effects on energy and food production.
Since the 1980s, environmentalists have argued that human activities are changing Earth’s climate, warning that emissions from fossil fuels coupled with deforestation are causing pollution, land degradation, damaging the ozone layer and raising global temperatures. In 1992, more than 100 heads of state and governments met at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, reflecting the integration of environmental concerns into world politics. However, despite 1997’s Kyoto Protocol, governments and global corporations have not met targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions or developed internationally agreed strategies for tackling the problem.
Moving towards sustainable development – the rational use of resources to meet current and future human needs, without inflicting irreversible damage to the environment – is a fundamental principle of Green politics. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have relied on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas to power the increasing needs of industry and domestic use. However, these resources are not only finite but also major pollutants contributing to climate change and global warming.
Green proposals for sustainable development include strict conservation of resources and the use of renewable energy, such as solar, wind and tidal power, rather than nuclear power or continued extraction of fossil fuels. Opposed to GM crops, environmentalists campaign for environmentally friendly farming practices, conservation and a more equitable distribution of resources, pointing out that Western nations consume a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources.
With their emphasis on ecology, environmentalists are often accused of denying developing nations access to the same wealth and sophistication enjoyed by industrial nations. Many argue that developing nations should be free to pursue the same economic paths as others have taken previously. Environmentalists, however, argue that environment and development are inextricably linked and cannot be treated separately. In the words of the 1987 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), ‘Failures to manage the environment and to sustain development threaten to overwhelm all countries … Development cannot subsist upon a deteriorating environmental base.’ All growth must therefore take into account the costs of environmental destruction. To this extent, environmentalists have promoted small-scale agricultural projects, the development of Fairtrade and an end to the Western world’s dumping of dirty industries onto the developing world, which has resulted in a number of eco-disasters, such as occurred in Bhopal in 1984.
Like other political movements, the Green movement contains people who have combined environmentalism with other beliefs. They include eco-socialists, Green anarchists and ecofeminists. Eco-socialism, also known as Green socialism, combines aspects of socialism or Marxism with environmentalism. Adherents argue that the global capitalist system causes not only poverty and social exclusion, but also degrades the environment and is wasteful of resources.
Green or eco-anarchism emphasizes ecology, as well as critiquing hierarchical and state structures. Influenced by the writings of American environmentalist Henry Thoreau and French anarchist Élisée Reclus, eco-anarchists argue that social reorganization must work with nature. Ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s; the term was probably first used by Françoise d’Eaubonne, who started a ‘Ecologie-Feminisme’ movement in France in 1972, declaring that the destruction of the planet was inevitable if power remained in male hands.
Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, was the first to use the term ‘deep ecology’ in 1973, although environmentalists and conservationists were already thinking along these lines. It implies the need to examine ecology at a very deep level and determine the long-term consequences of human impact on the world. Politically, deep ecology also links with and informs other movements, such as animal rights and Earth First. Deep ecology is effectively the ecological and environmental philosophy underpinning Green politics. It places value on all living beings, irrespective of their worth to humans, and advocates a radical restructuring of contemporary human societies. For adherents, Earth is not human-centric but rather consists of complex interrelationships or ecosystems, within which each organism relies on the others – a view with echoes of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which postulated that the Earth is a living organism. Human interference with any part of an ecosystem, such as deforestation, damages the natural balance, posing a threat to all living things.
