Green Political Thought

Andrew Dobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134597130
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Andrew Dobson's highly acclaimed introduction to green political thought is now available in a new edition. It has been fully revised and updated to take into account the areas that have grown in importance since the last edition was published.The third edition includes: * a comparison of ecologism with other principal modern ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, fascism, socialism, feminism and anarchism
* an assessment of the relationship between green thinking and democracy, justice and citizenship
* an exploration of 'sustainable development' addressing the fundamental question of 'what to sustain?'
* real environmental problems and how green thinking relates to them.

1 Thinking about ecologism

The British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt once wrote 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. In the Introduction I began to establish three points: first, that ecologism is not the same as environmentalism; second, that environmentalism is not a political ideology; and third, that while environmentalism is sufficiently non-specific for it to be hybridized with most ideologies, it is at its most uncomfortable with ecologism.

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 because of 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.

At the risk of being boringly repetitive, I want to emphasize that the maximalist approach is at its most appropriate when the issue of green politics as ideology is at stake. If the rubric is green political thinking in general then minimalism is fine, and a number of commentators have made productive use of the long-frontiered spectrum that then becomes available (see, for example, Young, 1992). I myself felt somewhat liberated at being asked on one occasion to write on ‘environmentalism’ rather than ‘ecologism’ (Dobson, 1994a) – yet there are disadvantages, and vagueness is one of them.

Andrew Vincent has written the most articulate and robust accounts from the minimalist position that I have come across (Vincent, 1992 and 1993), but even he concludes with some rather limp-looking ‘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)

Vincent’s fourth theme – that there is ‘a much less damaging and more positive attitude to nature’ than in other ideologies – is only uncontestably true of (what I call) ecologism rather than of environmentalism, so it should not really be in his ‘broad theme’ list at all. The second and third points are rather watered down by the words ‘tendency’, ‘minimally’ and ‘general’, and the first three points (with the possible exception of the second) 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 present approach. 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. (On the other hand, of course, overstressing the environmentalist credentials of the movement can hide ecologism from view.)

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, and my opposition to this view is based on the observation that while some of the ideas we now associate with ecologism were 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 the rethink of 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). ‘The earth is finite,’ write the authors of Beyond the Limits, sequel to the seminal The Limits to Growth 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). This ought to make it clear that from a green perspective 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 because of 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 can be seen as a political ideology in its own right.

I shall sketch what I understand the sustainable society to look like in Chapter 3, but one or two points about it should be borne in mind from the outset. Political ecologists will stress two points with regard to the sustainable society: one, that consumption of material goods by individuals in ‘advanced industrial countries’ should be reduced; and two (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. So it is argued that our aspiration to consume will be curtailed whether we like it or not: ‘In common parlance that’s known as having your cake and eating it, and it can’t be done,’ announces Porritt (Porritt, 1984a, p. 118). It is very important to see that 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 subscribing to different sets of values. As indicated by Porritt above, 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 highly influential 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 an (unoriginal) 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 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 can profitably be seen as part of the green contention that the sustainable society would be a spiritually fulfilling place in which to live. Indeed, aspects of the radical green programme can hardly be understood without reference to the spiritual dimension on which (and in which) it likes to dwell. Greens invest the natural world with spiritual content and are ambivalent about what they see as mechanistic science’s robbery of such content. They demand reverence for the Earth and a rediscovery of our links with it: ‘It seems to me so obvious that without some huge groundswell of spiritual concern the transition to a more sustainable way of life remains utterly improbable’ (Porritt, 1984a, p. 210). In this way the advertisement for frugal living and the exhortation to connect with the Earth combine to produce the spiritual asceticism that is a part of political ecology.

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 can 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 can be summarized under two headings: those that suggest that human beings ought to care for the environment because it is in our interest to do so, and those that 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. These, though, are not radical green reasons. The 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 which 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 like-minded 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.

So the political ideology of ecologism clearly wants to subscribe to a particular set of reasons for care for the environment but is confronted by a culture that appears to engender a crisis of confidence, and that forces it to produce another set – which it would like to see as subordinate – in public. This, then, is another characteristic of ecologism: that its public face is in danger of hiding what it ‘really’ is; and yet what it ‘really’ is is its public face.

Something similar might be said of the spirituality that sometimes surfaces in the writings of ecologists. Its advocates argue that radical green politics is itself a spiritual experience in that it is founded on a recognition of ...

Table of contents

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