Green Politics

Green politics refers to the political sphere of the Green movement (this article will capitalize Green for clarity), an international movement that often overlaps with other political [Page 229]movements but tends to describe itself as more than merely political and concerned with more than just specifics of governance. Though especially prioritizing environmental concerns, the Greens tend to intersect with social liberal concerns, such as feminism, peace movements and nonviolent protest, social justice, the protection of civil liberties, and a strong focus on participatory democracy and grassroots organization. This is an important consideration because it is not an automatic consequence of environmentalism: Although an individual or group could theoretically call for a dictatorial regime that curtails business and individual activity to protect the environment—a sort of martial law environmentalism—this would not be considered a Green position. Although there are a range of positions that can be taken in relation to green consumption (from consuming less to consuming green products as alternatives), green politics can both inform and facilitate the actions of consumers, organizations, and governments in relation to key themes of ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity.

Green politics developed out of 19th-century conservation movements that were a reaction to the rapid expansion, industrialization, mining, and urbanization seen in the later years of the Industrial Revolution. Complaints about the effects of urban living—contamination of bodies of water, air pollution, noise—had been made since the ancient world, and efforts to create nature reserves and to introduce responsible, sustainable methods of crop management are just as old. Human civilizations had weathered global climate changes in the 6th and 13th centuries without having the vocabulary to talk about them or the scientific awareness to conceive of climate as a complex system. Events like the spread of plague in 14th-century Europe led to a sort of embryonic understanding of the connections between public health (and public good) and the interaction between man and the natural world; it was the squalid conditions and dense population of urban living that permitted the epidemiology of the Black Death. The long-term effects of industrialization on the countryside and the environment catalyzed the conservation movement in the United States, which borrowed from the French and German “scientific forestry” that had begun a century or so earlier. Scientific forestry was designed to preserve the state of the forest, to safeguard it against what we now recognize as climate change, as well as from wildfires and artificial deforestation. Though no one was using the word sustainability yet, the conservation movement wanted exactly that—sustainable forests, active efforts at planting trees to make up for those being lost to industry, and lands set aside that industry would not be allowed to touch.