WeeklyWorker

04.11.2021

Greenism: a rough guide

Jack Conrad explores the organisations, history, business models, aristocrats, royal agendas and class limits

Like any socially significant ideological current, greenism has many schools of thought, competing leaders, rival campaigns, odd conjoinings and strange offshoots. However, even the briefest survey reveals the severe limitations of them all.

Green Party

There were more than a few commendable democratic demands contained in the 2017 general election manifesto of the Green Party (England and Wales): abolition of the standing armed forces; withdrawal from Nato; replacing the monarchy with a republic; proportional representation for local and parliamentary elections.1 Well to the left of Labour’s “socialist” For the many, not the few. Hence rightwing accusations that the Greens were a ‘watermelon party’: green on the outside, red on the inside. A nice joke, but their perspectives remain firmly located within the narrow confines of existing society.

As a matter of pride the underlying ethos is localism, not globalism. Small businesses, mutuals, home and self-employment are upheld as an ideal. Meanwhile, a remoulded banking system provides “cheap basic” services and lends “locally”.2 So finance capital is reigned in, but continues, albeit in a diminished form. Essentially the same happens with industrial capital.

Imagine then that the leader of the Green Party is called to Buckingham Palace and is asked to form a (republican) government. True, an unlikely scenario - more a thought experiment. For the sake of the argument, then, we shall put aside a joint chiefs of staff mutiny, MI5 black ops, pushback, military threats and crippling sanctions imposed by the global hegemon. Hiving off the UK parts of giant transnationals, if it were possible, would not only infuriate AstraZeneca, BP, Fords, BMW, Tata, Honda and Airbus … and invite retaliation (even, if only, in the courts). Such a policy, reversing the socialisation of labour, must send overall productivity plummeting.

What will result? Capital flight, sterling devaluation and steeply rising costs. Hyperinflation rips. Unemployment soars. Shortages grip. People turn to black and grey markets. Corrupt fortunes are made. Social tensions reach boiling point. Those with marketable skills flee abroad. A Green Party government would thereby be faced with an unenviable choice: either screw up rates of exploitation and administer poverty - that or abandon the “fight for equality”.

Unfazed, the Green Party breezily promises: “everyone” will “live happier and more secure lives”; “everyone” will have an income “above subsistence level”; there will be “an environment where everyone feels fulfilled in worthwhile employment”; and “everyone” will have “access to healthy, nutritious, locally grown food”.3 Greenism as manifest self-deception. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez champion a similar line in the United States.

In practice, the Green Party’s programme is far more prosaic: rhetorically urging legislation against polluting industries, promoting recycling, advocating a universal basic income, championing wind farms and solar panels, setting earlier dates for meeting net zero CO2 emission targets, etc. Not that talking the talk and walking the walk are synonymous. Proved in miniature with neoliberal Brighton and Hove: “a ‘Green’ council in name only”.4

Like their (junior governmental) colleagues in Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Luxembourg, the underwhelming GPEW leadership of Carla Denyer, Adrian Ramsay, Amelia Womack, Caroline Lucas and Jenny Jones are realos, not fundies. They want to be a “serious electoral force”.5 Here “serious” should be understood not merely as increasing votes, councillors, mayors and MPs. It means being politically acceptable, like Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater in Scotland … and, therefore, if given the chance, responsibly administering, not fighting, capitalism. Their role model is Germany’s Joschka Fischer. From being a leading member of the ultra-left Putzgruppe in the early 1970s, he soon ‘matured’. Fischer went on to serve as foreign minister and vice-chancellor in Gerhard Schröder’s 1998-2005 red-green coalition. Inevitably, he backed the Bundeswehr joining Nato’s Balkans intervention in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001.

In that same realo spirit, the republic, Nato withdrawal and a popular militia already gather dust - a passing childish phase. Put crudely, GPEW leaders are buyable. Open to the same institutional corruption that routinely sees fire-breathing politicians turned into pliant servants of capital (barely remarked upon by the mainstream media). Note: the Green Party-backed Republic in Parliament Campaign is now officially “closed”.6

To ensure that there remains not a shadow of doubt, Caroline Lucas, GPEW’s sole MP, vigorously defends the “very clear” International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s so-called ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism.7 Very clear code for restricting free speech, witch-hunting anti-Zionists and siding not only with the Israeli colonial-settler project, but the US-dominated world order. She has never been much of a fire-breather, but Lucas is all too willing to be a pliant servant.

Elites

Let us now look at the elitist pressure groups: Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are typical. For the price of an annual subscription their many tens of thousands of almost entirely passive members get a vicarious thrill from media-friendly campaigns and stunts.

Yet, despite the image of being fearless eco-warriors, such organisations are in fact top-heavy with managers, accountants, lawyers, press officers and fundraisers. “Interminable meetings, not action, are the order of most days,” writes Charles Secrett, FoE executive director between 1993-2003.8 Radicalism has certainly been blunted by the self-interested need to cultivate and maintain links with the political, business and cultural establishment.

Because Greenpeace relies on direct action, advertising and media publicity, it is run on a ‘command and obey’ basis. Greenpeace has numerous offices, its own ships, a helicopter and employs well over 2,000 people. Annual income amounts to some £300 million globally. Jobs as glamorous professional activists are much sought after. Scientists are employed too. Executives vie for dominance. Meanwhile, full membership is strictly limited and most local groups concentrate on money-raising. Chugging, on a wage of about £10-£11 an hour, has been turned into a successful business model.9

Interestingly, the first major action of Extinction Rebellion, on October 17 2018, was to occupy the London HQ of Greenpeace. Suffice to say its ‘beyond politics’ slogan explains both its current strength, but also its probable ultimate demise. Either way, it requires a separate article (which we shall do).

FoE (in England, Wales and Northern Ireland) is somewhat different from Greenpeace organisationally. For example, while its (interim) joint CEOs, Miriam Turner and Hugh Knowles, are on a £80-90,000 salary and preside over some 170 staff, they encourage local campaigning and initiative. However, finance not only comes from membership subscriptions. When it comes to elitist organisations, such as Greenpeace and FoE, capitalist philanthropists - eg, Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg - provide considerable sums and arguably set (or at least limit) the agenda. Inevitably then, capitalism is taken as a given - albeit, once again in the imagination, downsized and made eco-friendly.

Right

Almost by definition the same goes for Zac Goldsmith (Baron Goldsmith of Richmond Park, the environment minister) and Ryan Shorthouse’s “liberal Conservative” Bright Blue outfit.10

Tory greenism is, of course, nothing new. In October 1988 Margaret Thatcher made her famous ‘green’ conference speech: “No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy - with full repairing lease.”11 The Countryside Alliance also comes to mind. Claiming over 100,000 members, the ermine-led campaign aims to protect and promote the interests of rural Britain: farming, fishing, fox hunting … and making Brexit work.

Indeed, ever since industrial capitalism rose to dominance there has been a strand of Tory thought which has sought to defend so-called traditional ways against the flood tide of crass commercialism, utilitarian liberalism and republican democracy. Eg, Young England during the early 1840s. Born on the playing fields of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, it loosely grouped together a blue-blooded membership - George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Hope, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane, but most notably, its figurehead and leader, Benjamin Disraeli (who was no aristocrat, nor did he attend Eton).12

To gain a wider audience these gentlemen feigned indifference to their own specific class interests. Nostalgically they advocated a rural idyll of snug hamlets, independent artisans, upstanding yeomen farmers, benevolent Christian alms-giving and absolute monarchy. Everyone has their place and everyone knows their place: “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate”.

Dreamy poems and didactic novels lauding a mainly fabricated past went hand in hand with eviscerating attacks on rapacious industrialists who heartlessly exploited their workers, rode roughshod over family values and inadvertently fuelled the danger of revolution. Not that Young England had the least interest in nor wish for democracy. But they wanted to rouse the masses; that way they sought to restore the power of landed wealth and put an end to the “madness” of Chartism (Thomas Carlyle).13

Charles Windsor very much stands in this Young England tradition. In the name of “generations yet unborn”, he told world leaders gathered at Cop26 that we “have to put ourselves on what might be called a war footing” - the first time this writer has heard such language from a member of the ruling class, decorative or otherwise. But the “vast military-style campaign” his royal greenness envisages is designed to engage with the “global private sector”, not subordinate it to state power (so no climate socialism).14

The most comprehensive statement of eco-royalism can be found in HRH’s co-authored book, Harmony (2010). The future king begins by boldly declaring: “This is a call to revolution.” Against what? Well, nothing less than “the current orthodoxy and conventional way of thinking, much of it stemming from the 1960s, but with its origins going back over 200 years.”15 A barely concealed call for the counterrevolutionary restoration of feudalism.

Belief that western civilisation took a wrong turn with the Enlightenment is common coin amongst conservative traditionalists. Take Roger Scruton (1944-2020). He invented the term oikophobia - oiko being Greek for home - to damn those who repudiate tradition and country. He singled out, in particular, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for opprobrium. Scruton urged “environmentalists and conservatives” to make “common cause” around “territory”, in particular its “strongest political expression”, the “nation-state”.16

There is Edward Goldsmith (1928-2009), uncle of Zac, too. He argued for cutting the population by 50%, repatriating immigrants … and establishing a green social order based on the patriarchal family, small-scale communities and something resembling the Indian caste system.17 On that programmatic basis, Michael Benfield, Freda Sanders, Tony Whittaker and Lesley Whittaker founded the People party. Edward (Teddy) Goldsmith stood for them in the 1974 general election (and lost badly). In 1975 the People Party became the Ecology Party and 10 years later in another name change the Green Party (UK).18

Pro-capitalism

There are pale greens who unapologetically promote monopoly capitalism. A small clique, but well connected and therefore disproportionately influential. Jonathon Porritt’s Capitalism: as if the world matters (2005) serves as a kind of manifesto. He has been rewarded with all manner of posts, honorariums and prestigious invites. Charles Windsor is a friend and confidant. Porritt rejects capitalism, not “per se” - well, of course not - but in terms of this or that “particular model”. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that sustainability is fully compatible with a revised, retuned, recalibrated capitalism. If that is not possible, or so he claims, then one would be morally obliged to “devote one’s political activities” to the “overthrow of capitalism”.19 Well, capitalism still has not been revised, retuned or recalibrated, and yet we still await the clarion call for overthrow from ‘comrade’ Porritt.

Needless to say, ecological responsibility cannot replace accumulation as the mainspring of capital’s laws of motion. To claim otherwise is to desert objective reality ... true, for a well-rewarded capitalist reality. In 1996, following the line of least resistance, Porritt and Sara Parkin founded the Forum for the Future. After a simmering civil war they both resigned from the Green Party’s executive just a few weeks prior to its annual conference. Presumably, they expected humiliating defeat.

Forum for the Future is a well-heeled charity - 66 staff members and an annual income of £5.2 million. It courts big business and its cheque books. No one-way street. Forum for the Future magnanimously bestows green credentials on transnational corporations and translates sustainable development into the language of share price, cash flow, cost-cutting, efficiency and profit. Its 50-plus corporate sponsors and partners have, we are reassuringly told, a “proven commitment” to the environment.20 Only the naive will be surprised to learn that listed amongst the virtuous are: American Express, the British Aerosols Association, Land Rover Jaguar, Tata, Nestle, Sky, M&S and Aviva.21

Obviously being green is considered good public relations and therefore good business. Saving on inputs such as energy and other raw materials can certainly be presented in a way that enhances green credentials; motivated not by the intrinsic capitalist drive to minimise costs and maximise profits - rather a benevolent concern for the environment.

Eco-taxes and subsidies, emissions trading and carbon capture and storage all chime with manufactured public opinion. However, these green capitalist panaceas legitimise pollution, favour the most powerful concentrations of capital, threaten to pass on additional costs to the consumer or simply lead to offloading dirty industries onto the likes of China, India, Vietnam, Philippines, etc. Guilt can be exported.

Critiques

Prostituted apologetics of the type coming from the Forum for the Future notwithstanding, there are those greens who offer forthright critiques of monopoly capitalism. Overconsumption, insatiable greed and the wanton misuse of nature are all subjected to withering criticism and on occasion profound analysis. Many radical green thinkers proudly cite Gerald Winstanley, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin as their fiery inspiration. Others prefer the milder flavours of St Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.

Obviously, green anti-capitalism too comes in many strands. Before examining the deep greens, let us discuss Ernst Schumacher, George Monbiot and Murray Bookchin. Between the three of them they cover the spectrum of green thought that stretches from eco-theology by way of eco-Proudhonism to eco-libertarianism. Besides a burning desire for change, what joins them together is the big idea that ‘small is beautiful’.

The future must be non-capitalist, but also decentralised, self-reliant and non-hierarchical. However, the social agent capable of bringing about such an outcome remains totally unconvincing in each account. For Schumacher it is enlightened aid workers and third world bureaucrats. Monbiot talks of collective action by “poor countries”, while Bookchin looks to “libertarian municipalism”. All shrink back from the necessary task of organising the working class into a revolutionary party.

Ernst Schumacher (1911-77) considered unrestrained industrialisation to be the cause of “unlimited sorrows”, especially in the former colonial countries. Schumacher advocated ‘appropriate technology’ and rejected the ‘bigger is better’ ethos characteristic of the 1950s-60s long boom. He located this ethos not in capital’s spontaneous tendency to monopoly or/and the organised concentration of capital overseen by the social democratic state: rather in six leading ideas inherited from the 19th century.

That is Darwinism and “natural selection”; the “idea of competition” and “the survival of the fittest”; Marx’s observation that all “higher manifestations” of human life - religion, philosophy, art, etc - are nothing but “necessary supplements of the material life process”; the “Freudian interpretation which reduces human life to “the dark stirrings of the human subconscious”; relativism and “denying all absolutes”; positivism and the claim that “no knowledge is valid unless it is based on generally observable facts” and therefore denies the possibility of objective knowledge of purpose and meaning.22 These ideas, which “claimed to do away with metaphysics”, were in fact, intoned Schumacher, “bad metaphysics and bad ethics”.23

Joining natural selection and historical materialism together with positivism and scientism is not as absurd as might first appear. Ideologically the post-World War II period was under the tyrannical sway of productionism - social democracy and mainstream liberalism on the one side, the official ‘Marxism’ of the Stalinites on the other. Though manifestly failing to locate the real causes, Schumacher exposed the negative ecological results of both capitalist and Stalinite economic growth. As an alternative he opted for what he called ‘Buddhist economics’ (though he himself converted to Catholicism). His model was post-independence Burma!

A regular columnist in The Guardian, George Monbiot has written a string of excellent books: Amazon watershed, Heat, Captive state, Feral, etc. His case for a “democratic revolution” - fully elaborated in The age of consent (2003) - skilfully dissects the “global dictatorship of vested interests”. Clearly a welcome revolt against capitalism, but just as clearly a reinvention of pre-Marxist utopian socialism.

Once a confirmed localist, he now espouses globalism - at least in terms of strategy. His democratic revolution begins at the global level. Anarchism and green capitalism are rightly rejected. But Monbiot suffers from what can only be described as a Pavlovian aversion, when it comes to Karl Marx. To use a phrase, he sees red. The merest mention of Marxism sends his brain into a spin. Monbiot ridiculously blames Marx for Stalin’s gulags, Maoism and Pol Pot. Bureaucratic socialism is put down to the Communist manifesto. His “pathological” Stowe public school education clearly conditioned him all too well.

Monbiot has gone to the trouble of drawing up a detailed blueprint for tomorrow’s world. There will be a 600-seat global parliament - one MP for every 10 million electors. Parliamentary voting will be weighed according to a sliding democratic scale - once again courtesy of our clever friend. However, the authority of this august body would be purely moral. National states would continue to exist. It is just that they would now be under pressure to do the right thing. The world ‘government’ would have no law courts, no army. Nonetheless, a ‘fair trade’ organisation ensures that transnationals retract their exploitative claws and respond to popular environmental concerns and worries.

How such a ‘one person, one vote’ global institution is supposed to arise, while national states and US, EU, UK, Japanese and Chinese transnationals still constitute the dominant economic power, is lightly skated over. But does anyone really expect the US administration to facilitate its citizenry voting in Monbiot’s elections? Would Washington shoulder the considerable costs involved? And what of ‘rogue states’ such as Iran, Syria, North Korea and Afghanistan? Though Monbiot gives a passing nod in the direction of existing campaigning organisations, his elaborate schema is built on nothing more substantial that the clouds of fantasy.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) offers a slightly less utopian perspective. Describing himself as a libertarian communist - a former ‘official communist’ and then Trotskyite - he took theory seriously. His considerable body of work contains many worthwhile criticisms of the domination and hierarchy involved in class society. This has produced humanity’s imbalance with nature. He has no time for pro-capitalist greenism, overpopulation panics or primitivist technophobia - all have inherently reactionary implications. A complete social revolution is needed.

Bookchin’s unwillingness to embrace the means - the mass revolutionary party - is perfectly understandable, especially given the US radical milieu he inhabited. The countless, tiny, self-isolating, often unhinged sects, which still buzz around, grandly claiming to be the party, pathetically reproduce the structures and much of the attending egotism of capitalism itself. Central committees behave as boards of directors, the rank and file are treated as mere speaking tools. Then there are the proprietorial general secretaries.

Fleeing from this madness, Bookchin found refuge in the idea of little communes, municipalities which consist, to begin with, of putative hardcore cadre. Somehow these bacilli survive within the decaying body of capitalist society and steadily grow into organs of dual power. Momentarily suspending our disbelief at the chances of this happening, we are still left with a fundamental problem.

If for some reason these extended households managed to avoid succumbing to state repression, to the pressures and lures of everyday capitalist society, then, no matter how powerful they became, they would still come to grief on the shallow reefs of localism. By their very nature they would generate sectional, not universal, interests and, therefore, quickly fall into bickering rivalry. The fate of trade unions as trade unions, coops as coops and soviets as soviets. Without the coordination, discipline and theory provided by the highest form of working class organisation, sectionalism is bound to take hold.

Deep greens

As personalities the likes of Schumacher, Monbiot and Bookchin are clearly motivated by a heartfelt desire to improve the lot of the world’s population. That cannot be so readily said of deep greens. Yes, they despise car culture, pollution, monocrop agriculture, the whole cult of economic growth. However, for them, the adverse effects this has on humanity is secondary. Nature comes first. We have many responsibilities to nature, but few definite claims on it.

Arne Naess (1912-2009), the Norwegian mountaineer and sage, began laying the theoretical foundations as far back as the early 1950s - at least to the degree that deep greenism can be considered a theory. He attacked the short-termism, the irrationality of neo-classical economics and sought to displace anthropocentric modes of thinking with what he and his followers call “biocentrism or ecocentrism”.24

Anthropocentrism - which I take as meaning that humans alone have intrinsic value - dates back, he argues, to the Neolithic (counter)revolution, around 10,000 years ago. The adoption of anthropocentric modes of thought is collectively remembered in the story of Yehovah’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and other such myths.

The long and the short of it is that, once human beings stopped venerating nature and started to treat it as a thing to be subdued, an object fit only for exploitation, then they fell from grace and condemned themselves to the endless drudgery of labour. Civilisation thereby becomes a terrible mistake, a dangerous detour. Suffice to say, deep greenism lacks anything resembling an adequate account of history.

Deep greenism amounts to a retrogressive plea for humanity to adapt to nature, to give up on all hope of progressive social change and return to a lost innocence of childhood. But no adult can perform such a feat. Nor can the human species. The door to the past is permanently closed. It is impossible to sustain a 7.9 billion global population with Palaeolithic hunter-gathering. The only door open to us is the future.

According to Naess, there is no moral hierarchy of life. He rejected all paradigms whereby species are ranked according to whether they have a soul or possess consciousness. Naess says: “... the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.”25

This is not the self-destroying ordinance it might first appear to be. Despite the insistence on non-hierarchy, elementary biological necessities have to be recognised. “Except to satisfy vital human needs”, there is no sanction to kill. But there is a “vital human need” for food that must be constantly satisfied. People have to consume fellow life forms … and thankfully they can do so with the sanction of the deep greens. In point of fact, there is a deep green macho minority, which actually revels in hunting, shooting and fishing as a means of rediscovering their human essence (nature being red in tooth and claw).

In that naturalistic spirit, we find green thinkers such as (Saint) James Lovelock - he of the Gaia hypothesis - scornfully dismissing the pain and suffering of his fellow human beings:

Our humanist solicitude towards the poor living in the impoverished suburbs of the big cities of the third world, and our almost obscene obsession with death, suffering and pain - as if these were harmful in themselves - all these thoughts deflect our attention from the problem of our harsh and excessive domination of the natural world. Poverty and suffering are not sent; they are the consequence of what we do. Pain and death are natural, we could not survive for long without them.26

Those species which pose a threat to Gaia’s self-regulation - ie, we humans - are likely, he says, to face extinction, as the planet moves to find a new stable state: ie, the climate tips from one qualitative state to another. The Earth strikes back.

A line of thought which has led some deep greens to view the HIV/Aids virus either neutrally or as a welcome response to the human cancer.27 Celebrating authenticity, fragility and destiny, these ecobrutalists decry anti-Aids drugs and the entire health infrastructure. Nature knows best. Via polio, influenza, Aids, Sars, Ebola, Covid-19, etc, humanity is culled. When that task is finally completed, it is deep green survivalists who inherit the planet.

Such viewpoints more than smack of anthropomorphism. Nature is given human attributes. Hence we find the American naturalist, Aldo Leopold, telling us to “think like a mountain” and Christopher Stone asking, “do trees have rights”? A rhetorical question. Forests, mountains, rivers and lakes should be given the same legal status as corporations, he suggests.28 The absurd notion is that this would stop exploitation. History, to put it mildly, fails to support such a contention. Capital treats what is bought and sold, what is property, in a purely instrumental (slave-like) fashion. Necessarily that entails mistreatment as a means to an end. Labour is exploited. So too is nature.

Biocentrism, to state an obvious truth, is a human-created ideology. If it means recognising that humans are part of nature - the uniquely conscious part - that human society should cease fetishistically worshipping production as its one and only real god, that we should start looking after nature by reordering ourselves, then no worthwhile communist would disagree. On the other hand, if biocentrism means placing the interests of humanity against those of nature, diminishing humanity and depicting it as a cancer, then we must strenuously disagree.

Deep greenism comes ‘unencumbered’ by a fully debated and democratically agreed programme. It is a loose conglomeration and ideologically very pick and mix. Consequently deep greens are more than prone to both navel-gazing individualism and falling under the spell of the latest social media-generated mass hysteria. Exponents frequently hold completely juxtaposed viewpoints and easily lurch from elation to despair and back again.

Ecofeminist deep greens blame “capitalist patriarchy” and male values for the degradation of the environment.29 Women are considered innately attuned to nature. Menstruation and motherhood separate them from men and go towards what is essentially a form of biological determinism. Not a few have taken to witchcraft.

One celebrated exponent of deep-green irrationalism is the physicist, Fritjof Capra, founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. According to his official website, he “frequently gives management seminars for top executives”.30 After touring Germany in the early 1980s, Capra co-authored Green politics (1984) with ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak. In The Tao of physics (1975) and later books, such as The web of life (1996) and The hidden connections (2002), he details why he believes physics and metaphysics are both inexorably leading to the same stunning conclusion: “there are hidden connections between everything”.31

As is standard deep green fare, Capra dismisses as outdated the mechanical ‘Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm’ - in justification he cites 20th century developments in sub-atomic physics and systems theory. Instead, he calls for a delving back to the truths that can be discovered in the ancient eastern outlook - ie, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism - which maintain a mystical holism. Of course, the truths Capra finds in these religions/philosophies are a primitive, one-sided form of dialectics, developed by members of the pre-capitalist ruling classes - specifically those intellectuals who possessed the abundant leisure time needed to contemplate and debate.

However, their dialectics were quietist, a means of interpreting, not radically engaging with the world. That precisely was the great advance brought about by the Marx-Engels team. Marxism continues, but transcends, philosophy. Marxism is quintessentially about practice: investigation is for the purposes of overthrowing all existing social conditions and, through that, establishing a genuinely human relationship with nature.

  1. Apart from PR, all were exorcised, come 2019: www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/gp2017/greenguaranteepdf.pdf; www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Elections/Green Party Manifesto 2019.pdf.↩︎

  2. www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/gp2017/greenguaranteepdf.pdf.↩︎

  3. www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Elections/Green Party Manifesto 2019.pdf.↩︎

  4. www.brightonandhovenews.org/2021/06/06/evidence-suggests-that-its-a-green-council-in-name-only.↩︎

  5. My emphasis - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58761003.↩︎

  6. www.indiegogo.com/projects/republic-in-parliament-campaign.↩︎

  7. electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/uk-green-mp-stops-motion-against-bogus-anti-semitism-definition.↩︎

  8. The Guardian June 13 2011.↩︎

  9. www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Greenpeace-Salaries-E9123.htm.↩︎

  10. See R Scruton How to seriously think about saving the planet Oxford 2012; Z Goldsmith The constant economy London 2009; and: brightblue.org.uk/about.↩︎

  11. R Harris (ed) The collected speeches of Margaret Thatcher London 1997, p341.↩︎

  12. See J Morrow (ed) Young England Leicester 1999.↩︎

  13. T Carlyle Chartism London 1840, p4.↩︎

  14. news.sky.com/story/cop26-prince-charles-tells-g20-world-leaders-the-future-of-humanity-and-nature-herself-are-at-stake-12456102.↩︎

  15. HRH Charles, T Juniper and I Skelly Harmony: a new way of looking at our world London 2010. Downloadable as a pdf from: media.oiipdf.com/pdf/d2a72f67-c6d9-4168-9857-d662e09a73f6.pdf.↩︎

  16. R Scruton How to seriously think about saving the planet Oxford 2012, p19.↩︎

  17. See E Goldsmith and R Allen A blueprint for survival Harmondsworth 1972.↩︎

  18. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Green_Party_of_England_and_Wales.↩︎

  19. J Porritt Capitalism, as if the world matters London 2011, p87.↩︎

  20. www.forumforthefuture.org.↩︎

  21. www.forumforthefuture.org/who-we-work-with.↩︎

  22. EF Schumacher Small is beautiful London 1993, pp68-69.↩︎

  23. Ibid p72.↩︎

  24. A Drengson (ed) The selected works of Arne Naess Vol 1, Dordrecht 2005, p18.↩︎

  25. A Naess Ecology, community and lifestyle: outline of an ecosophy Cambridge 2001, p166.↩︎

  26. J Lovelock The ages of Gaia: a biography of our living planet Oxford 1995, p198.↩︎

  27. See: rationalwiki.org/wiki/Hard_green.↩︎

  28. See CD Stone Should trees have standing? Los Angeles 1974.↩︎

  29. See M Mies and N Shiva Ecofeminsim London 1993.↩︎

  30. www.fritjofcapra.net.↩︎

  31. F Capra Hidden connections London 2003, pvii.↩︎