Green politics

"Green politics" refers to the international movement to foreground concerns over the environment in public policy. With its roots in the mid-1970s, when concerns over pollution and environmental damage first became a prominent element of political discourse, green politics proposes that through nonviolence, visionary legislation, and cooperation among nations, the world’s governments can successfully address long-term environmental concerns. The concept of green politics has come to influence government systems in every industrially developed country in the world, and virtually every country has within its political organization a group of vocal activists concerned specifically with environmental concerns. Unlike other prominent activist political movements, such as civil rights or peace movements (with which it sometimes overlaps), green politics focuses not on a single nation’s problems or social issues but rather seeks to place that nation and its issues within a global context.

As with most political ideologies, green politics has a spectrum of expressions, ranging from eco-terrorists (or eco-anarchists), who hold to uncompromising idealism and pursue radical (and sometimes illegal) activities to halt whatever is perceived to be damaging the environment, to conservative expressions that seek to create a moderate level of cooperation between governments and businesses to effect some degree of environmental remediation or intervention.

Background

Concern over the environment and the ethics of humanity’s interactions with the ecosystem that keeps it alive is not new, but seldom had those concerns expressed themselves in broad political activism. The long-held philosophical exhortation for humans to respect and preserve nature began to increase volubly as industrialization expanded in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, the nineteenth-century American writer Henry David Thoreau contrasted the beauty of nature with the ugliness and destruction wrought by technological changes, such as the railroad. Environmentalism, as it is thought of in modern times, however, is a legacy of the American counterculture movement of the 1960s. Environmental activists began to agitate over the long-term (and, in many cases, irreversible) damage being done to the ecosystem, most notably through air and water pollution.

Because those who saw cause for genuine alarm regarding the fate of the environment did not feel as though established political parties gave their agendas significant attention, they began to form their own parties. Green politics—that is, the expression of environmental concerns through political activism—dates to 1972, when the world’s first eco-centric political party, the United Tasmania Group, was created in Australia to protest the construction of a massive dam that jeopardized a national park. Within a decade, similar green political parties were formed in both the United States and Europe. The designation "green" came from the West German environmental activist movement in the early 1980s. During the 1980s, these green parties organized from loose confederations of local activists into national movements. The first Green Party candidate to run for in a statewide office in the United States was in 1990 in Alaska. In 1996, a coalition of state green parties nominated the first Green Party presidential candidate in the United States.

Overview

For green parties, governing is essentially a matter of local interests; after all, nothing more immediately affects an area than its environmental health. Green politics stresses that government must be answerable to directing the sustainability of the local environment, making the long-range impact of development and industrial policies a primary concern, rather than focusing primarily on immediate economic reward or benefits.

Green politics, although invested in a wide variety of environmental causes, centers on four principles. First, people need to perceive themselves as part of a natural order and to consider how to have minimal impact on their ecosystem. Second, in the pursuit of social justice and social equity, the dimension of the environment cannot be ignored, although reasonable self-interest should guide environmental policy. Third, politics is not about politicians and parties but rather the people—a grassroots vision that encourages every person to be engaged in the political order. Fourth, in an era when radical environmental groups have perpetrated acts of violence as protest, the direction of environmental activism must rest on nonviolence, working to overthrow governments or policies not friendly to the environment through peaceful protest, street agitation, and political processes. The Green Party of the United States added an additional six tenets—decentralized politics, local economics, gender equity, diversity, personal and global responsibility, and long-term sustainability—which the Global Greens federation, an international network of green parties, also embraced in its founding charter in 2001. Thus, the vision of the green parties focuses on creating a global community rich in diversity and united in creating long-term stability and sustainability for the environment.

As a splinter political party, the US Green Party has struggled to have an impact through elections. In the United States, third parties of all types have long had difficulty competing in the dominant two-party system. Yet despite the fact that mainstream America has long viewed greens as elitists or extremists bent on upending long-held economic systems, according to the GPUS Elections Database, as of 2024, more than 6,800 Green Party candidates had run for public office since the party’s founding in 1984, of whom at least 1,575 were elected. As of November 2024, 159 Green Party members held office in the United States. It is often easier for smaller political parties to be elected in countries operating under the parliamentary system of proportional representation. In 2024, 53 Green Party members held office in the twenty-eight member states in the European Parliament.

Perhaps the greatest importance of green parties is their ability to increase political involvement by creating awareness of the impact political policies have on the environment. Public advocacy groups such as the Sierra Club and nongovernmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are examples of the indirect political expression of green politics.

Bibliography

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"Summary of Green Party Candidates." GPUS Elections Database, 21 Nov. 2024, www.gpelections.org/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2024.

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