The Books Which Inspired The Founding of The Green Party

What is now The Green Party of England and Wales was founded in 1973 as The PEOPLE Party. In the summer of 1972 Lesley Whittaker a surveyor and property agent bought a copy of Playboy magazine in which there was an interview with Dr Paul R. Ehrlich about overpopulation and how he and his wife were giving up two years of their lives to the cause. Erhlich had recently published a book about population growth entitled "The Population Bomb", which the article was about. This article inspired Whittaker and her husband Tony to form a small group of professional and business people 'Club of Thirteen', so named because it first met on 13 October 1972 in Daventry. In November 1972 the Whittaker's, Freda Sanders and Michael Benfield agreed to form 'PEOPLE' as a new political party to challenge the UK political establishment. Officially formed at the start of 1973, The PEOPLE Party produced a Manifesto for a Sustainable Society as a background statement of policies. This was directly  inspired by "A Blueprint for Survival" (published by The Ecologist magazine). The editor of "The Ecologist" magazine, Edward 'Teddy' Goldsmith, merged his 'Movement for Survival' with PEOPLE. Goldsmith became one of the leading members of the new party during the 1970s.
The third book which inspired the founders of PEOPLE was "The Limits to Growth". Commissioned by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book about the computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth with finite resource supplies.

Themes: Population and Economic Growth

The major theme of all of these books is the alarming rate of global environmental degradation resulting from human activity. They warn against the effects of unlimited economic growth and population growth on the world's resources, biodiversity and human well being. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to criticise these books, particularly The Population Bomb, for getting the timings wrong and predicting that utter disaster would happen before the end of the 20th century. However while the timescale may have been over the top, the essential warnings within these books remain starkly convincing. Moreover they show that ecological concerns were the main reason that what became The Green Party was founded in the first place. The key point stressed in The Population Bomb is that it took from the evolution of humanity until 1830 for the population to reach one billion. The next billion took only 100 years. The third billion took 37 years. The fourth billion took 13 years. And so on. The cause is not just too many births it is also the falling death rate. The world's population will continue to grow as long as the birth rate exceeds the death rate, it is as simple as that. When it stops growing or starts to shrink , it will mean either the birth rate has gone down or the death rate has gone up or a combination of the two.
My problem with those optimists who now criticise these books  is that they see the pattern in the West as a universal one (that increasing prosperity lowers the birthrate) regardless of cultural, religious or traditional factors. It also tends to fly in the face of the majority of the span of human history. Ehrlich says of the optimists in, The Population Bomb:

"They are a little like a person who, after a low temperature of five degrees of frost on December 21st, interprets a low of only three on December 22nd as a cheery sign of approaching spring."

It fails also to take into account that the death rate will continue to fall. Even the optimists accept that the population could be 11 billion by 2100. Given the likely increase in world consumption as consumerist lifestyles spread along with urbanisation, the result may well be that by 2100 the rain forests have gone, adding to global warming and we will have passed the point of no return. Also by then loss of habitat will have resulted in the mass extinction of tigers, elephants and a mass of other species, in the wild . The best hope is the reduction in world poverty, as economic security is the best chance for lowering the birthrate. Also the emancipation of women. However both need to be accompanied with an acceptance of the issue.

The Subsequent Development of The Green Party

In 1975, PEOPLE was renamed and relaunched as The Ecology Party. Then in 1985 it became The Green Party of Great Britain. In response to the rumours of a group of Liberal Party activists about to launch a UK Green Party, HELP (the Hackney Local Ecology Party) formally registered the name The Green Party, with a green circle as its logo. The first public meeting, chaired by David Fitzpatrick (then an Ecology Party speaker), was 13 June 1985 in Hackney Town Hall. Paul Ekins (then co-chair of the Ecology Party) spoke on the subject of Green politics and the inner city. Hackney Green Party put a formal proposal to the Ecology Party Autumn Conference in Dover that year to change to the Green Party, which was supported by the majority of attendees, including John Abineri, formerly an actor in the BBC series Survivors who supported adding Green to the name to fall in line with other environmental parties in Europe.

Finally The Green Party of England and Wales was created in 1990 when the former Green Party split into separate parties: Scottish Green Party, Green Party in Northern Ireland, and England & Wales.

We Must End Neo-Liberalism, Starting with the UK

According to Naomi Klein, Canadian journalist, activist and author of "The Shock Doctrine" and "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate" ( http://thischangeseverything.org/book/) :

“We are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” 
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

THE SCALE OF CLIMATE CHANGE WORLDWIDE

Obviously climate change is a global issue rather than a national one. However it is up to developed nations such as the UK to set precedents and advance the fight back. The current rate of global warming is extremely alarming. Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850. Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss. Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later. Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching, or die-off in response to stress, ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

As Naomi Klein shows in "This Changes Everything", Neoliberalism and free market fundamentalism are preventing initiatives to combat global warming rather than encouraging them.
In 2010, for example, the United States challenged one of China's wind power subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained protectionist supports for local industry. Ironically China filed a similar complaint in 2012 targeting various renewable energy programs in the EU, singling out Italy and Greece. Time after time neo-liberal trade agreements have encouraged more and more air travel, transporting of goods over ridiculous distances and challenged localised production on the grounds that it is protectionist. Secretive trade deals such as TTIP are the inevitable consequence the path we have been on since the late 1970s. As Klein puts it:

"You have been told that the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. Change requires breaking every rule in the 'free-market' playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies and reclaiming our democracies".

BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT : WHY MAGGIE WASN'T GREEN

I get annoyed when green campaigners use the term 'left-wing' to describe themselves. It is exclusive, limiting and associated with the politics of class conflict. Many 'left-wing' regimes have had terrible environmental impacts ( http://markgoachergreen.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/book-recommendation-stalins-legacy.html). Yet it is the case that the right has been so comprehensively hijacked by neo-liberalism since the late 1970s that we think in these terms. We need to be moving forward. Which means rejecting both neo-liberalism and the old anti-ecologist left. However eco-socialism is welcome.
Which brings me to Mrs Thatcher.......
For a time in the late 1980s Mrs T actually managed to convince some naive souls that she had 'gone green'. Tutored by Sir Crispin Tickell, British ambassador to the UN in New York, she made several dramatic environment speeches. The first, to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988, galvanised the emerging green debate in Britain by stating:
"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself."
The second, to the UN general assembly, in November 1989 was aimed at the international community. Thatcher had by then understood the environment's political importance in a globalising world and was the first major politician to hold out the prospect of international legislation. But the real motivation was because the Green Party looked dangerous after securing 15% of the UK vote in the European elections only months before. Back when Sara Parkin and David Icke were the principal speakers. I remember this well as I was living in Leicester at the time and recall that anyone who was not going to vote Labour was undecided between Green or Conservative.

Now for the reality.......

Maggie was about as green as I am a freshly squeezed watermelon. Her enthusiasm for green issues soon evaporated. She opened the Hadley Centre for climate prediction and research in 1990 but did not attend the Rio Earth summit, leaving her successor, John Major to formally sign up Britain to forest, climate and other agreements. In retirement she had nothing more to say about the environment until her 2002 memoirs, when she rejected Al Gore and what she called his "doomist" predictions about climate change.
The reason for this is that Mrs Thatcher was one of the chief architects of the rise of neo-liberal fundamentalism along with Sir Keith Joseph and economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. She was not only anti-green to the core but also a bad conservative as well. By a bad conservative I mean that she and her ilk desired to transform not to conserve and to create an economic model which would unleash unfettered destruction of the natural environment and the institutions of civil society.

THE WIENER THESIS

When Mrs Thatcher was plotting how to transform the economy in the early 1980s, she instructed her patron and close ally Sir Keith Joseph to give every member of her new cabinet a copy of  a 1981 book by Martin Wiener entitled "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980". They were ordered in no uncertain terms to read it. Wiener was an American academic whose book had ironically found favour with some of the dinosaurs on the academic Marxist left such as Eric Hobsbawm. This shallow, nasty little book's main contention was that English culture was holding back rampant capitalism and development because of its sympathy with the countryside and nature.It was a concerted attack on the British elite for its indifference to and wariness of industrialism and commercialism. Although the commercial and industrial revolutions originated in England, Wiener blamed a persistent strain in British culture, characterised by wariness of capitalist expansion and yearning for an Arcadian rural society, which had prevented England, and Britain as a whole, from fully exploiting the benefits of what it had created. Constable paintings of rural landscapes, William Blake's art and paintings, William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wordsworth's nature poetry and so on were all to blame. Wiener believed that any concern over pollution or the human cost of the industrial revolution was some foppish upper-class indulgence. His solution was to forget such 'sentimentalism', forget the countryside and concrete it over. Let loose rampant development!
The poisoned legacy of the Wiener Thesis lives on today in David Cameron and George Osborne. Freeing up the free market must come first. So the planning rules have been reformed to create a presumption in favour of development and remove environmental regulations. When Cameron talked of "dropping the green shit" you could almost see the ghosts of Mrs T and Sir Keith Joseph smiling down on him.

THIS NEO-LIBERAL MADNESS MUST END, STARTING WITH THE UK

Since the UK was at the forefront of the neo-liberal revolution, it should be at the forefront of its demise. Currently free-market fundamentalism dominates the thinking of all the grey parties as well as the governments and functionaries who shape the policy of the EU. It dominates culture in the UK in ways that Wiener would be proud of. The answer lies in a return to protectionism. We must adopt a new approach which I would term the ten heresies.

THE TEN HERESIES:

1) Protect small localised producers from competition from international corporate interests via tariffs and preferential trade agreements.

2) Regulate all economic activity to serve ecological goals.

3) Preferably use our influence to reform the EU away from neo-liberalism and use its institutions to achieve heresies 1 & 2. If this is not possible pull out of  the EU.

4) Raise income tax in order to expand and subsidise renewable energy at the expense of fossil fuels.

5) End all road building schemes, impose high taxes on air travel and reduce airport capacity.

6) Weave ecology into the curricula of all schools. Put as much emphasis on encouraging children to become young naturalists as it put on IT skills.

7) Impose tariffs on imported milk and food to protect small local farmers.

8) Create public works programs, paid for via general taxation and selling government bonds, in conservation, renewable energy such as wind farms, planting new forests and other key areas of the green economy.

9) Ban all development in the countryside

10) Reduce the working week, expand leisure time and set a target of zero unemployment.

Book recommendation: "Stalin's Legacy: The Soviet War on Nature" Struan Stevenson

In 2014  Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was reported as suggesting  that only Communism is capable of successfully fighting global warming and that communist China should be viewed as a role model in the fight against environmental damage:

“[China] actually wants to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.”

Clearly Christiana Figueres is ignoring the fact that China continues to expand its number of coal-fired power stations at an alarming rate, however there is a more fundamental mistake being made here ie that Communism as an ideology is somehow green or that its concern for, 'the national interest' (odd considering that Communism is in theory if not practice internationalist) is more likely to favour green approaches to the economy. As an antidote to this kind of guff I'd recommend the grimly fascinating book, "Stalin's Legacy: The Soviet War on Nature", by Struan Stevenson.

Some people may be thinking that, given the massive human cost of Stalin's economic policies (estimated by most historians as around 20 million deaths), that therefore attacking his regime for its ecological impact is somehow missing the main point. However Stevenson's book does not try to ignore the horrific human consequences,  the gulag system, mass starvation and slave labour, but rather to show how a blind indifference to individual human life and a blind indifference to the environment went hand in hand together. Communism as an ideology is purely materialistic and it promised a better material standard of living than Capitalism. It was never mean't to be an alternative to massive growth and mass consumption, rather it was supposed to do it better than Capitalism and produce more and faster economic growth, admittedly with less inequality in the 'workers state' that it promised. Obviously it failed but the point is that Communism was never supposed to end up like North Korea with a dead-end economy but rather to produce mass industrialism on a huge scale.
Clearly what I am talking about here, and the theme of Stevenson's book, is not Socialism in its broader sense but Marxism-Leninism as practiced in the USSR and those countries which adopted the Soviet model. In Russia itself prior to the Civil War (1918-1921) there were many socialists who favoured an approach to economics based on the peasants (82% of the population in 1900 and therefore the majority of 'the people'). For example the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) the heirs of the Narodnik (Populist) movement in the 19th century. The SRs actually won the November 1917 Constituent Assembly election, however Lenin closed the Assembly down by force because he didn't like the result and went on to eradicate all opposition to his own group, the Bolsheviks, in a Civil War which cost 10 million lives. There then followed, under Stalin in the 1930s, an attempt to industrialise the USSR in 10 years based on the mass use of forced labour. In the name of 'the people' the peasants (who were the people, at least most of them) were condemned as petite-bourgeois and branded as 'Kulaks' (private farmers) if they opposed the creation of huge collective farms run as industries, the communist equivalent of massive agribusinesses. Most of course were not Kulaks but members of their local Mir or village commune ie localised, socialist inclined small scale production units. However as Lenin once said, "telling the truth is a bourgeois prejudice", and so the peasants were sent on mass to the gulag system.
As far as the ecological impact of Stalin in concerned, Stevenson's book is a catalogue of grimness. Much of the book is concerned with the plight of the victims of nuclear testing in East Kazakhstan. Also there is the destruction of the Aral Sea, the desiccation of which reduced what was the world's fourth largest inland body of water to half its size in just 50 years. It is a searing indictment of Stalin's environmental impact and the Marxist-Leninist worldview which spawned his regime.

Book recommendation: "Farmageddon" Philip Lymbery & Isabel Oakeshott

This is an excellent book and very topical given the recent horsemeat scandal. However despite the title it covers more than just the meat industry, it being an examination of the whole intensive farming industry and its impact on our countryside, health and wildlife.
The first few chapters cover topics that are fairly familiar, battery hens , pesticides and the decline in our wildlife. There is a whole section on the decline in bees with Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) being linked to a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. These are not sprayed on the plants but on the soil so that the soil itself becomes toxic and the whole plant gets to absorb the chemicals, becoming 'poison factories' to insects. In 2013 the EU voted to ban the use of neonicotinoids on crops deemed attractive to bees however the UK voted against the measure. Indeed a common thread throughout the book is the role that the EU plays in regulating food production and the fact that UK governments are often seeking to remove or prevent positive EU regulation in the interests of big business vested interests. Should a laissez faire , neo-liberal party ever lead the UK out of the EU then expect a round of deregulation of pesticides, sprays and animal care regulation.
However it is when the book moved on to animal care other than hens and then food hygene issues that it became a real eye opener. Battery style farming of cows on an industrial scale means that they have to be injected with umpteen antibiotics as their crammed in living conditions make disease rife. All of which leads to overuse and the result is super bugs and animals whose natural disease resistance declines. Cows and pigs stand all day in pens where they cannot turn round and are stuffed full of artificially enhanced food as grass grazing cannot produce the level of milk to 'maximise efficiency' or fatten them up for the kill quickly enough.
We then get full descriptions of unhygienic slaughterhouses, meat contaminated with faeces entering the food chain and the devastating effect on the basic nutritional quality of meat of factory production with the fat content going through the roof at the expense of protein. By 2030 annual obesity-related health costs in the UK are expected to soar by £1.25 billion. Meanwhile meat production is deliberately being 'outsourced' from the UK to those parts of the world where animal welfare rules are lax (thus maximising profits) and where they are less fussy about what gets bunged into the grinder, hence the horse meat scandal . The only surprising thing about the latter is that it was only horse meat they found and not a wider range of animal matter.
All in all this is a frightening book which I've only briefly summarised. Carcinogenic pesticides, GM cows producing 'human milk', But the best parts of the book are where they explode the myth that industrial farming is some kind of driver of equality, that it provides cheap food for all and that it is somehow immoral for people to oppose it. This is nonsense because factory farming of meat drives up overall food prices because of the vast quantities of grain and soya required to feed the animals. Factory farms deliver low cost (and lower quality) meat to people in the developed countries at the expense of cereal prices rising in the poorest parts of the world. As the 'Hundred-Dollar Hamburger' chapter makes clear, this then eventually does impact negatively on the price of an average bag of shopping in the UK as well.