Green Political Theory (original) (raw)

2014, Political Ideologies, 4th edition

Ecologism or green political theory is the most recent of schools of political thinking. On the one hand, it focuses on issues that are extremely old in politics and philosophical inquiry – such as the relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds, the moral status of animals, what is the ‘good life’, and the ethical and political regulation of technological innovation. Yet on the other, it is also characterised as dealing with some specifically contemporary issues such as the economic and political implications of climate change, peak oil, overconsumption, resource competition and conflicts, and rising levels of global and national inequalities. It is also an extremely broad school of political thought covering a wide variety of concerns, contains a number of distinct sub-schools of green thought (here sharing a similarity with other political ideologies) and combines normative and empirical scientific elements in a unique manner making it distinctive from other political ideologies. First a word about definitions. There are a number of terms used to describe green political theory ranging from ‘ecologism’, to ‘environmentalism’ or ecological political theory or environmental political theory (Barry and Dobson, 2003). This chapter uses the term ‘green political theory’ on the grounds that both ecological and environmental labels, while certainly conveying one of the key distinguishing features of green political theorising – namely its focus on both the material/metabolic dimensions of human-nonhuman relations as well as the ethical and political status of the nonhuman world – can offer a rather narrow understanding of green politics. What I mean by this is that ecologism, or environmental political theory, as a way of categorising green politics is too focused on these issues of nature and human-nature relations and does not, at least in my view, allow sufficient scope for the ‘non-ecological’ and ‘non-nature related’ principles of green politics This is particularly the case in respect of understanding and appreciating the specifically intra-human dimensions of green political theory. There is a common distinction often made in the literature between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecologism’ (Dobson, 2007), with environmentalism denoting a form of ‘single issue’ green politics solely concerned with, for instance, pollution and resource management, and ecologism denoting a fully fledged political ideology with views on non-resource and non-environmental concerns. In this respect what is offered here is closer to ecologism than environmentalism, but nevertheless uses green political theory as the appropriate term since even ecologism conveys a definite sense (at least on first sight) that green politics is largely or exclusively concerned with the non-human world and human-nonhuman relations. Thus while it may seem to be simply a pedantic issue, this chapter uses ‘green political theory’ instead of ‘ecologism’ as a more appropriate, inclusive categorisation of green politics, which fully acknowledges the uniqueness of its focus on nature while also stressing its radical approach to the organisation of human social, economic and political relations, consistent, but not exclusively tied to or derived from its focus on the metabolism between humans and nature.