I joined the Green Party little more than a year ago (and in terms of things happening it has been a very full year). There was little or no philosophy in my decision – it was made because I was starting to get very scared about the state of the world’s physical environment, and that still remains my primary motivation, only strengthened by the development of the climate data over the year.
But having a little time and space, I thought I should think a little about the sort of “green” I am, in terms of philosophy – beyond being a feminist, which is always my starting point. So being me, I’ve picked up a couple of books.
First up was Greta Gaard’s Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens, which turns out to be a mixture of philosophy and accounts and of the birth and somewhat uneasy existence of the US Green Party, in its variation incarnations, leading up to the Nader presidential campaign, of which Gaard very clearly disapproved. Wikipedia has a decent summary of the basic story, while Gaard provides a great deal, in many places rather too much for me, more, about who attended what meeting and participated in which working group.
It would be hard to imagine a tougher place to set up a Green Party than the US, and some of its problems were very specific to time and place, but I do see some of the same tensions and differing views in the England and Wales Greens. That’s not to say the Green Party is more prone to this than any other (just look at “New Labour” and “Old Labour” and the left/right sides of the Lib Dems) but it is integral to the very nature of party. Unless you have as many parties as voters, which kind of removes the point, then formation of parties inevitably involves compromises and alliances with which you are bound at times to be uncomfortable.
This was one paragraph that I thought cut to the heart of the matter for Greens:
“For Spretnak, the real debates in the Greens … were between humanism and ecocentrism, between a Hegelian/Marxist approach and a Gandhian/ecofeminist post, between anticapitalism and community-based economics, between strategic nonviolence and nonviolence, and between leftist politics and spirituality.(p. 106)”
Except I have problems with both of those.
More problems with the “spiritual” side – since I’m the very opposite, a materialist, in the sense that I think here this world, is it, and any attempt to create some supernatural outside of that is both senseless and actively harmful – a product of the human brain that has been necessary up to now to help us live in our phsyical environment, but that needs to be overcome if we are to come to grips with the real physical threat of ecological destruction that we now face. It seems to produce, in the terminology of this book, at its extreme, “deep ecology”, which can end up, I’d say, hopelessly antihuman.
Yet I’m not entirely comfortable with the Marxist/Hegelian approach either, since underlying that very fundamentally, in the nature of the dialectic itself, is the subject/object, self/other dualism that has been so key to the oppression of women. And in its focus on the economic, on the means of production, I find it an inadequate analysis to deal with the complexity of human societies and interactions.
So what of the “ecofeminism” of the title? Gaard begins with “a pledge of allegiance to the family of earth”, by the Women’s Environment and Development Organization:
I pledge allegiance to the Earth, and to the flora, fauna and human life that it supports, one planet, indivisible, with safe air, water and soil, economic justice, equal rights and peace for all.
Gaard says that this pledge “reconceives some of the fundamental elements of liberal democracy: the limits of society in the nation-state, the limits of community in humans with specific properties, the separation of human community from other human communities and from nature, the concept of liberty as social noninterference in the autonomous individual’s free pursuit of personal gain, and the implication that an inclusive form of justice can exist in contexts characterised by environmental degradation, overconsumption, militarism, the religious justificiation of privilege, and the concentration of global wealth in the hands of an elite minority”. (p. 259)
There’s a lot in that – but on a personal level I can’t help clinging at some point to the liberal idea of the individual, as an independent actor, however, constrained, within a societal context. I’m too much of a loner to not want some space of my own, cut off, by choice, from too close a sense of community.
So I guess I’m a postmodernist feminist green – hopefullly drawing insights and analysis from all of these approaches while not accepting any of them wholesale, at the end of the day just wanting to take the practical steps that might save the ecosystem of the earth today. And I’m an electoralist Green, because I think that using the political mechanisms we have now to both actually elect Greens, and use that electoral pressure to pull other parties towards as “green” a position as possible, is the most effective form of action available.
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