Green Political Thought

Andrew Dobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134141081
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition, having been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas which have grown in importance since the third edition was published.

Andrew Dobson describes and assesses the political ideology of 'ecologism', and compares this radical view of remedies for the environmental crisis with the 'environmentalism' of mainstream politics. He examines the relationship between ecologism and other political ideologies, the philosophical basis of ecological thinking, the potential shape of a sustainable society, and the means at hand for achieving it.

New to this edition:

• analysis of an intellectual and political 'anti-environment' backlash
• an account of sustainability in ecological thought
• the effect of globalization on ecologism
• ecological citizenship
• expanded bibliography.

Green Political Thought remains the starting point for all students, academics and activists who want an introduction to green political theory.

1 Thinking about ecologism

The British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt once said that ‘Having written the last two general election manifestos for the Ecology Party, I would be hard put even now to say what our ideology is’ (Porritt, 1984a, p. 9). In this chapter I want to establish some of the ground rules for this ideology, and in doing so I will build on two points established in the Introduction: first, that ecologism is not the same as environmentalism, and second, that environmentalism is not a political ideology.

I should say at the outset that these points set my views at odds with most of those who have written recently on political ecology as ideology. The more common position is that both environmentalism and ecologism need to be considered when green ideology is at issue, with writers typically offering a ‘spectrum’ of green ideology with all the necessary attendant features such as ‘wings’ and ‘centres’. Elsewhere I have referred to these two approaches to green ideology as ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ (Dobson, 1993a). Maximalist commentators define ecologism tightly: ‘people and ideas will have to pass stringent tests before they can be properly called political-ecological’, while minimalists ‘cast their net wider so that the definition of ecologism is subject to fewer and/or less stringent conditions’ (Dobson, 1993a, p. 220). It will be clear that I take a maximalist position, partly due to the ground rules that I consider any description of any ideology must follow, which are betrayed by including environmentalism as a wing within a description of green ideology: partly because the submerging of ecologism in environmentalism is in danger of skewing the intellectual and political landscape, and partly because of how little the minimalist position actually ends up saying.

Andrew Vincent has written the most articulate and robust accounts from the minimalist position (Vincent, 1992, 1993) but even he concludes with some rather unspecific ‘broad themes’ in (what he calls) green ideology:

most [political ecologists] assert the systematic interdependence of species and the environment . . . [and] there is a tendency to be minimally sceptical about the supreme position of human beings on the planet. Furthermore there is a general anxiety about what industrial civilisation is actually doing to the planet.

(Vincent, 1993, p. 270)

The themes he identifies are rather watered down by the words ‘tendency’, ‘minimally’ and ‘general’, and they are so general as to be acceptable to a large number of people in modern industrial societies today – certainly a larger number than would style themselves political ecologists.

But it is only right to outline two advantages of the minimalist position, both of which are passed up in the approach adopted in this book. The first is that it reflects clearly the rather eclectic nature of the green movement itself. Many of the people and organizations whom we would want to include in the green movement are environmentalist rather than political-ecologist, and defining ecologism as strictly as I want to can obscure this very important truth about green politics.

The second advantage is that the minimalist approach allows us to see that the movement has a history – a fact which is less obvious from the maximalist point of view because it tends to date the existence of ecologism from the 1960s or even the 1970s. Minimalists will typically look to the nineteenth century for the beginnings of ecologism, but while some of the ideas we now associate with ecologism were indeed flagged over a hundred years ago, this is a far cry from saying that ecologism itself existed over a hundred years ago. Jesus Christ’s cleaving to a measure of social equality did not make him a socialist, and nor does it mean that socialism existed in the first century ad. These, then, are the general issues at stake in thinking about ecologism, and they will resurface as detail in what remains of this chapter.

The need for a rethink of the values proposed in the radical green agenda is derived from the belief that there are natural limits to economic and population growth. It is important to stress the word ‘natural’ because green ideologues argue that economic growth is prevented not for social reasons – such as restrictive relations of production – but because the Earth itself has a limited carrying capacity (for population), productive capacity (for resources of all types) and absorbent capacity (pollution). This view was first put forward in its fullest form in The Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1974), a book which is of seminal importance to ecologism. It has been revised and updated twice (Meadows et al., 1992 and 2005), but the message has remained substantially unchanged. ‘The earth is finite,’ write the authors of Beyond the Limits, sequel to the original Limits report, and ‘[G]rowth of anything physical, including the human population and its cars and buildings and smokestacks, cannot continue forever’ (Meadows et al., 1992, p. 7). From a green perspective, then, continuous growth cannot be achieved by overcoming what might appear to be temporary limits – such as those imposed by a lack of technological sophistication; continuous and unlimited growth is prima facie impossible. This theme will be pursued in Chapter 3.

At this point ecologism throws into relief a factor – the Earth itself – that has been present in all modern political ideologies but has remained invisible, either due to its very ubiquity or because these ideologies’ schema for description and prescription have kept it hidden. Ecologism makes the Earth as physical object the very foundation-stone of its intellectual edifice, arguing that its finitude is the basic reason why infinite population and economic growth are impossible and why, consequently, profound changes in our social and political behaviour need to take place. The enduring image of this finitude is a familiar picture taken by the cameras of Apollo 8 in 1968 showing a blue-white Earth suspended in space above the moon’s horizon. Twenty years earlier the astronomer Fred Hoyle had written that ‘Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose’ (in Myers, 1985, p. 21). He may have been right. The green movement has adopted this image and the sense of beauty and fragility that it represents to generate concern for the Earth, arguing that everyday life in industrial society has separated us from it: ‘Those who live amid concrete, plastic, and computers can easily forget how fundamentally our well-being is linked to the land’ (Myers, 1985, p. 22). We are urged to recognize what is and has always been the case: that all wealth (of all types) ultimately derives from the planet.

Sustainable societies

The centrality of the limits to growth thesis and the conclusions drawn from it lead political ecologists to suggest that radical changes in our social habits and practices are required. The kind of society that would incorporate these changes is often referred to by greens as the ‘sustainable society’, and the fact that we are able to identify aspects of a green society distinguishable from the preferred pictures of other ideologies is one of the reasons why ecologism may be seen as a political ideology in its own right.

I shall outline what I understand the sustainable society to look like in Chapter 3, but two points about it should be borne in mind from the outset. First, political ecologists will stress that consumption of material goods by over-consuming individuals in ‘advanced industrial countries’ should be reduced; and second (linked to the first), that human needs are not best satisfied by continual economic growth as we understand it today. Jonathon Porritt writes: ‘If you want one simple contrast between green and conventional politics, it is our belief that quantitative demand must be reduced, not expanded’ (Porritt, 1984a, p. 136). Greens argue that if there are limits to growth then there are limits to consumption as well. The green movement is therefore faced with the difficulty of simultaneously calling into question a major aspiration of most people – maximizing consumption of material objects – and making its position attractive.

There are two aspects to its strategy. On the one hand it argues that continued consumption at increasing levels is impossible because of the finite productive limits imposed by the Earth. On this view our aspiration to consume will be curtailed whether we like it or not. Greens argue that recycling or the use of renewable energy sources will not, alone, solve the problems posed by a finite Earth – we shall still not be able to produce or consume at an ever-increasing rate. Such techniques might be a part of the strategy for a sustainable society, but they do not materially affect the absolute limits to production and consumption in a finite system:

The fiction of combining present levels of consumption with ‘limitless recycling’ is more characteristic of the technocratic vision than of an ecological one. Recycling itself uses resources, expands energy, creates thermal pollution; on the bottom line, it’s just an industrial activity like all the others. Recycling is both useful and necessary – but it is an illusion to imagine that it provides any basic answers.

(Porritt, 1984a, p. 183)

This observation is the analogue of the distinction made earlier between environmentalism and ecologism. To paraphrase Porritt, the recycling of waste is an essential part of being green but it is not the same thing as being radically green. Being radically green involves living a different kind of collective life. Greens are generally suspicious of purely technological solutions to environmental problems – the ‘technological fix’ – and the relatively cautious endorsement of recycling is just one instance of this. As long ago as the The Limits to Growth thesis it was suggested that ‘We cannot expect technological solutions alone to get us out of this vicious circle’ (Meadows et al., 1974, p. 192) and this has since become a central dogma of green politics.

The second strategy employed by green ideologues to make palatable their recommendation for reduced consumption is to argue for the benefits of a less materialistic society. In the first place they make a distinction between needs and wants, suggesting that many of the items we consume and that we consider to be needs are in fact wants that have been ‘converted’ into needs at the behest of powerful persuasive forces. In this sense they will suggest that little would be lost by some possessing fewer objects. The distinction between needs and wants is highly controversial and will be considered in more detail in Chapter 3.

Second, some deep-greens argue that the sustainable society that would replace the present consumer society would provide for wider and more profound forms of fulfilment than that provided by the consumption of material objects. This may profitably be seen as part of the contention made by some greens that the sustainable society would be a spiritually fulfilling place in which to live. There has recently been something of a boom in ‘happiness studies’, and it has been pointed out that there is no correlation between the raw wealth of a society and the happiness of its citizens (Layard, 2003, 2005). Western societies have become richer over the past fifty years, but they have not necessarily become happier. There are a number of reasons for this which it would be inappropriate to detail here; suffice to say that happiness research has lent some support to the long-standing green contention that fulfilment is not a necessary function of wealth, and that Gross Domestic Product is a poor proxy indicator for well-being.

A controversial theme in green politics which is associated with the issue of reducing consumption is that of the need to bring down population levels. As Fritjof Capra explains: To slow down the rapid depletion of our natural resources, we need not only to abandon the idea of continuing economic growth, but to control the worldwide increase in population’ (Capra, 1983, p. 227). Despite heavy criticism, particularly from the left – Mike Simons has described Paul Ehrlich’s proposals as ‘an invitation to genocide’ (Simons, 1988, p. 13) – greens have stuck to their belief that long-term global sustainability will involve reductions in population, principally on the grounds that fewer people will consume fewer objects: ‘the only long-term way to reduce consumption is to stabilize and then reduce the number of consumers. The best resources policies are doomed to failure if not linked to population policy’ (Irvine and Ponton, 1988, p. 29). The issue of population will be critically assessed in Chapter 3.

Reasons to care for the environment

In an obvious way, care for the environment is one of ecologism’s informing (although not exhaustive) principles. Many different reasons may be given for why we should be more careful with the environment, and I want to suggest that ecologism advances a specific mix of them. In this sense, the nature of the arguments advanced for care for the environment comes to be a part of ecologism’s definition.

In our context such arguments may be summarized under two headings: those which suggest that human beings ought to care for the environment because it is in our interest to do so, and those which suggest that the environment has an intrinsic value in the sense that its value is not exhausted by its being a means to human ends – and even if it cannot be made a means to human ends it still has value.

Most of the time we encounter arguments of the first sort: for example, that tropical rainforests should be preserved because they provide oxygen, or raw materials for medicines, or because they prevent landslides. This is not a complete list of reasons, though. The additional ecological perspective is neatly captured in The Green Alternative in response to the question, ‘Isn’t concern for nature and the environment actually concern for ourselves?’:

Many people see themselves as enlightened when they argue that the nonhuman world ought to be preserved: (i) as a stockpile of genetic diversity for agricultural, medical and other purposes; (ii) as material for scientific study, for instance of our evolutionary origins; (iii) for recreation and (iv) for the opportunities it provides for aesthetic pleasure and spiritual inspiration. However, although enlightened, these reasons are all related to the instrumental value of the nonhuman world to humans. What is missing is any sense of a more impartial, biocentric – or biosphere-centred – view in which the nonhuman world is considered to be of intrinsic value.

(Bunyard and Morgan-Grenville, 1987, p. 284)

Lurking behind this statement are complex issues that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2, but in this context of thinking about ecologism we need to make a distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ ecologist. The private ecologist, in conversation with likeminded people, will most likely place the intrinsic value position ahead of the human-instrumental argument in terms of priority, suggesting that the latter is less worthy, less profoundly ecological, than the former. The public ecologist, however, keen to recruit, will almost certainly appeal first to the enlightened self-interest thesis and only move on to talk about intrinsic value once the first argument is firmly in place.

Crisis and its political-strategic consequences

No presentation of ecologism would be complete without the appropriate (usually heavy) dosage of warnings of doom and gloom. Political ecologists invariably claim that dire consequences will result if their warnings are not heeded and their prescriptions not followed. The thirty-year update of Limits to Growth provides a typical example:

we are much more pessimistic about the global future than we were in 1972. It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but halfhearted, responses to the global ecological challenge.

(Meadows et al., 2005, p. xvi)

The radical green’s consistent use of an apocalyptic tone is unique in the context of modern political ideologies, and it might be argued that the movement has relied too heavily on these sorts of projections as a means of galvanizing people into action. The consequences of this have been twofold. First, there is the unfounded accusation by the movement’s critics that it is informed by an overwhelming sense of pessimism as to the prospects of the planet and the human race along with it. In fact the movement’s pessimism relates only to the likely life expectancy of current social and political practice. Greens are generally unerringly optimistic with respect to our chances of dealing with the crisis they believe they have uncovered – they merely argue that a major change of direction is required. As Beyond the Limits concludes:

[T]his decline is not inevitable. To avoid it two changes are necessary. The first is a comprehensive revision of policies and practices that perpetuate growth in material consumption and in population. The second is a rapid, drastic increase in the efficiency with which materials and energy are used.

(Meadows et al., 1992, p. xvi)

The second and perhaps more serious consequence of the movement’s reliance on gloomy prognostications is that its theorists appear to have felt themselves absolved from serious thinking about realizing the change they propose. This, indeed, is another feature of the ideology that ought to be noted: the tension between the radical nature of the social and political change it seeks, and the reliance on traditional liberal-democratic means of bringing it about. It is as though the movement’s advocates have felt that the message was so obvious that it only needed to be given for it to be acted upon. The obstacles to radical green change have not been properly identified, and the result is an ideology that lacks an adequate programme for social and political transformation. Further comment on this will be made in Chapter 4.

Universality and social change

A related feature that ought to be mentioned, however, is the potentially universal appeal of the ideology. Up until now it has not been aimed at any particular section of society but is addressed to every single individual on the planet regardless of colour, gender, class, nationality, religious belief and so on. This is a function of the green movement’s argument that environmental degradation and the social dislocation that goes with it are everybody’s problem and therefore ought to be everybody’s concern: ‘we are all harmed by the ecological crisis and therefore we all have a common interest in uniting together with people of all classes and all political allegiances to counter this mutually shared threat’ (Tatchell in Dodds, 1988, p. 45; emphasis in the original). Ecologism thus has the potential to argue more easily than most modern political ideologies that it is, literally, in everyone’s interest to follow its prescriptions.

This is not so obviously true of other modern political ideologies. None of them is able to argue that the penalty for not following its advice is the threat of major environmental and social dislocation for everyone. The potentially universal appeal generated by this observation has undoubtedly been seen by the green movement as a positive characteristic, to be exploited for all it is worth. I shall examine this position in Chapter 4 and ask whether or not this belief is misplaced, and whether it has in fact been counterproductive in the sense of providing another reason for not attending sufficiently rigorously to the issue of social change. This thought has been prompted by the environmental justice movement in the USA which has pointed out that environmental degradation is suffered most acutely by the poor and the vulnerable, not by the rich. So poor communities get more than their fair share of landfill sites, and environmental disasters disproportionately affect the weak (Gerrard, 1995). For example, Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Florida coast in 2005 and devastated New Orleans, affected poor people more than wealthier ones, not so much because the disaster was any worse in the poorer suburbs but because people living in them were not able to cope with its effects. So people with money were more easily able to flee the city while those without private transport or the fare for buses and taxis had to stay behind. These observations have given rise to what Joan Martinez-Alier has called ‘the environmentalism of the poor’ (2002). Martinez-Alier contrasts a northern, post-materialist environmentalism with a southern materialist environmentalism, with the latter aimed at securing a fair share of environmental resources for weak and vulnerable people. This kind of environmentalism calls into question the universalism discussed above, and suggests that poorer people have a stronger and more immediate interest in ‘just sustainability’ than those who are better-off.

Left and right: communism and capitalism

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 (die Grünen) transcend the linear span of left-to-right’ (Spretnak and Capra, 1985, p. 3). Jonathon 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, 1984a, p. 44). The basis for this claim is that from a certain 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...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to the fourth edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• 1 Thinking about ecologism
• 2 Philosophical foundations
• 3 The sustainable society
• 4 Strategies for green change
• 5 Ecologism and other ideologies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography