Pathways for the Green Movement
Explore the evolving environmental movement, from green growth to degrowth, and the challenges shaping our planet’s future.
In 1968, the first-ever photo of the Earth from space was taken by Apollo mission astronauts.
The paradigm shift that this set in motion brought about a quantum leap in the role of ecology, especially in the US, from an academic science to a nascent popular movement.
Starting in 1969, and continuing into the 1970s and beyond, two of the world’s largest environmental groups took shape. Both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth originated in the US and later evolved into global networks. In 1970, the first Earth Day event was held in the US, and around the same time, Republican President Richard Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Agency while introducing a range of laws to combat pollution. Today, these same laws are being rolled back in the US.
Over the decades, some lessons have been learned, one of which is that voluntary action by consumers and citizens, while important, is no substitute for corporate regulation. The weakness with voluntarism is that often only the more informed, motivated and, in some cases, affluent members of society are likely to make the ethical choice. It is no surprise that when corporations seek to evade regulatory burdens, they commonly use the language of individual responsibility.
Tied to this is the strong focus of green groups on failures and shortcomings when it comes to the actions of governments and companies, and obviously, this harsh spotlight is often justifi ed. However, such a “half-empty cup” fixation can, in the public’s mind, merge into the negative news offered by the mainstream media and can easily lead attention away from the many positive and inspiring grassroots environmental initiatives happening around the world at a local level.
Targeting finance has emerged as a powerful strategy for attempting to prevent the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure by corporate giants. The availability of loans and insurance has been identified as a weak link, and the Australian group Market Forces is focused on campaigning in this area. As for the governments that are flying in the face of science by continuing to approve new fossil fuel developments, it looks as though they are yet to receive the memo.
Re-evaluating growth
If you listen to the business news, economic growth is presented as a fundamentally positive goal. Yet maintaining it on a finite planet is viewed as impossible by some green thinkers and academics. Within the broader environmental movement are camps that are well-disposed towards growth (green growth and ecomodernists) and others that are generally opposed (degrowth, deep ecology and “doomers”).
The bottom line for the sustainability of economic growth is whether it can be decoupled from resource use, energy use and carbon emissions. To date, in those countries where this climate decoupling has occurred, the drop in emissions has rarely been sufficient to reach the national contribution towards a 1.5-degree Paris Agreement target.
Some commentators get the wrong handle on economic growth by seeing it as an optional add-on to the economy caused by consumption patterns. In reality, it is embedded in the design of modern economies, which are in turn determined by the debt-based financial system. Replacing growth with a different system would involve a fundamental overhaul.
Energy transformation comes at a price
In 2023, US writer and community organiser Max Wilbert posted on media app Substack a piece titled “How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bulldozer” that was accompanied by two side-by-side images. One was a cover of the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine with a photo of a woman hugging a digger arm, and the headline “Yes in Our Backyards: It’s Time for Progressives to Fall in Love with the Green Building Boom”. The other was a photo of Wilbert sitting on a similar excavator arm at a protest at the Thacker Pass lithium mine site in Nevada.
Because climate change is increasingly taking on the shape of a life-or-death pivotal issue, and because a fast transition to renewables is widely viewed as the singular key measure for reining it in, environmental and social damage in aid of the renewables rollout, where it occurs, is sometimes seen as a justified and regrettable necessity. This ties in with the “mining-equipment huggers” and their tendency to make a distinction between “good” mining (critical minerals for new technology) and “bad” climate-destroying mining (fossil fuels).
Negative impacts are already being felt by the Hongana Manyawa, an uncontacted Indonesian indigenous tribe facing the risk of extinction from nickel mines on their land. Thacker Pass, a semi-arid place important to Native Americans, is soon to be destroyed for a 3.7km x 1.6km open-pit lithium mine. Building solar farms in America’s Mojave Desert has resulted in the loss of some Joshua trees and desert tortoise habitat, when the same panels could instead have been installed on the roofs of large commercial buildings.
An argument advanced by mining expert Simon Michaux is that we lack sufficient minerals for the renewables rollout. Unlike many other renewables critics, Michaux has advanced his own constructive vision known as the Purple Transition, which steers around what he sees as scarce mineral bottlenecks. Meanwhile, at a global scale, fossil fuel use continues to rise, despite fast growth in renewable energy: to be fair, the fast-tracking of renewables is preventing a steeper rise in fossil fuel usage from otherwise occurring.
The machine
Paul Kingsnorth is a writer and co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, who spent decades as an environmental activist. In his view, environmentalism has drifted away from its historical focus on protecting nature in favour of a light-to-mid-green mix of technology and economic growth designed to preserve the affluent world’s standard of living, and humanity into the bargain. His term for this is the Machine.
Difficult trade-offs and compromises are becoming increasingly common in the name of sustainability. Pathways that look like the only route out of the maze could, at some future point, be identified as dead ends, in which case it would really help to have a fully formulated Plan B on hand.
What you can do
In the face of growing challenges in the environmental arena, what can concerned people do? Individual actions are no substitute for government regulation, but they are still worth taking, while putting any green consumer claims through a sceptical filter. In terms of the most impactful actions for reining in climate change, a 2017 study found that, in order of impact, these were: having one fewer child; living car-free; avoiding a long-haul flight; and buying green energy.
Attempting to make a difference can work best, and be more fun, when it is done as part of a group with defi ned goals. In addition to activist groups, other examples include the Transition movement (a localised community-based response to the challenges of climate change and transitioning to a lower-energy future), Sustainability Street (hyper-localising positive eco action on one’s street), community gardens and repair cafes, where broken items are fixed so that they can be reused.
Shades of green
Today’s environmental landscape spans a wide spectrum of movements, philosophies and responses to the climate crisis.
Green growth
Most closely aligned with the large environment NGOs and mainstream green perspectives, this involves the rollout of renewables, battery storage and electric cars on a vast scale while aligning with growth-based economic business-as-usual. There is no strong emphasis on behaviour change, such as cutting back on consumption. Adherents of green growth also tend to favour the use of technology as an aid in achieving sustainability.
Degrowth
Originating in France, and also active in Italy and Spain, this movement seeks to reverse economic growth and, by implication, give capitalism a radical overhaul, given that growth-free capitalism appears to be an impossibility. It advocates significant changes in economic and social organisation that would probably result in a less consumerist and more localised and convivial way of life. Implementing these ideas would mean an end to luxury and material affluence, in favour of sufficiency.
Deep ecology
Occupying the dark green end of the environmental spectrum, deep ecology was developed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the early 1970s. Here, humans are a part of the web of life rather than the top of a pyramid. Deep ecology values a deep connection and interdependence between humans and nature. Undisturbed natural areas, especially wilderness, are considered intrinsically valuable, aside from their economic value and their practical usefulness to people.
Direct action
Non-violent direct action has always been central to Greenpeace’s tactics and has long been used elsewhere in championing green causes. In recent years, it has seen a renaissance, with the arrival of groups using disruption strategies to target the general public. These include Extinction Rebellion in the UK, and later worldwide, and its sister groups Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. Unpopular with most of the population, their protests were impossible to ignore and yielded one or two key government concessions. In Australia, environmental direct-action protests have most commonly targeted native forest logging and coal transport.
Doomers
Doomers are doubtful that our present society can be maintained in the face of the ramifications of climate change and other environmental challenges. In their view, the human response has been too little and too late. To the environmental mainstream, doomers are a key enemy of climate action and their viewpoint risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. One prominent group with this perspective is Just Collapse, which holds that the collapse of modern civilisation is inevitable and should involve locally focused “socio-ecological” justice. It holds a pessimistic opinion of global degrowth, which it views as an impossibility.
The Ecomodernists
In 2015, a like-minded group of people came together under the banner of the Ecomodernist Manifesto. These individuals are supportive of technologically oriented measures such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, geoengineering, GM food and synthetic proteins. Other planks include urbanisation, opposition to suburbanisation, and support for intensive farming and rural depopulation. Its near-opposite is degrowth.
A non-environmentally focused philosophy adjacent to ecomodernism is the cornucopian theory, advocating a human-centric world with no limits on economic growth, population growth, technology or resource use. A near-opposite is deep ecology.
Anti-environment trends
In recent years, opposition to environmental causes has been seized on, especially by the far-right, as a populist identity politics issue. Tied to individualistic notions of freedom, this can involve ostentatious statements and behaviours tied to high-carbon habits such as driving a four-wheel-drive and eating red meat. Such attitudes align closely with the aims of polluting industries and environmentally oriented corporate deregulation (“cutting green tape”), which is occurring not only in the United States but also in the European Union and New Zealand.
