A BC Green Party co-founder urges a radical new path. Pursuing electoral power hasn’t paid off, and the planet can’t wait.
Elections for the leaders of the provincial and federal Green parties are ongoing, sparking conversations about the best candidate and the parties’ platforms. But given the limited inroads made in a decade pursuing electoral power, a different challenge faces the Greens.
As the climate crisis clock winds down, it’s time for the party to reinvent itself and, in the process, reinvent politics. Here is my proposed roadmap.
I offer it as one with deep ties to the movement. I co-founded the provincial party and am a long-time environmental activist and academic writing about environmental law and politics. I remember how the Greens came to be, and their early ambitions.
Like the environmental movement generally, the Greens have their roots in the activism of the 1960s and ’70s, years of social rebellion and the quest for alternatives. Both manifested strongly in B.C.; for example, in the back-to-the-land movement and the rise of direct-action tactics through new groups like Greenpeace.
At the time, B.C.’s environmental culture was affected by the flood of American draft dodgers into the province — from the Kootenays to the Gulf Islands, Vancouver to Haida Gwaii. Theirs is a legacy of resistance and reinvention.
As a Greenpeace campaigner in the 1970s and ’80s and a co-founder of Greenpeace International in 1978-1979 as well as the BC Green Party in 1983, I still draw inspiration from that era. In particular, I recall the birth in Germany of die Grünen (the Greens) who embraced direct action against building new freeways and nuclear power plants and American nuclear missiles being installed in Europe.
These years were also informed by a critical dialogue that drew attention to the systemic problems of alienation and domination driven by the rise of corporate capitalism and middle-class consumerism. This dialogue drew on a raft of popular books like Small Is Beautiful to One-Dimensional Man. In tandem with countless university sit-ins, activists challenged the so-called hegemony of mainstream institutions that shaped what people saw as normal and possible. Such a counter-cultural dialogue and its radical agenda is largely absent from today’s environmental movement.
Permeating die Grünen was a tension between those dedicated to the fundamental goal of building a new world through collective social action and those realists seeking incremental change through the political process. This was evident in the famous struggle between what the Germans called the fundis and the realos. In 1980, Die Grünen chose the realo path by becoming a political party.
Nevertheless, throughout the 1980s, green was still a “radical” term. (That word is drawn from the Latin that means pertaining “to the root.”) However, over time, the word was co-opted, and green became a description of environmentally friendly dish soap. In the pursuit of political power, the Green Party also trimmed its sails to gain acceptance within the mainstream.
In Canada over the past decade, being a Green has meant being a member of a parliamentary-style party. Over that time, the Greens held a single seat in the federal House of Commons as well as in the B.C. legislature. Today, it has three seats (out of 338) in Ottawa, and two (out of 87) in Victoria.
This is not a route that will save the planet.
So how might the Greens work to achieve system change? Put simply, by returning to their roots by redirecting their ambitions from gaining power inside the legislature to enhancing collective action in the world outside it. This is the difference between political reform and social reformation.
If not state politics, where is the new arena for action?
Consider, for example, the support for “renewable energy” as an alternative to fossil fuels and electric cars as a way to slow carbon change. Dozens of government initiatives now promote this reformist agenda. Yet where is the progress on reducing society’s still profligate use of energy and metals, or reining in the power of big energy companies, car and truck makers and corporate advertisers? How else can we remake our cities except by getting private vehicles out?
To achieve such changes, the reformer would need to address the material and economic foundations of our dominant liberal order. By “liberal order,” I don’t mean the Liberal party as contrasted with the Conservatives or Greens. I mean the whole social order built on a philosophy that celebrates the self-seeking individual and the institutions that give vent to that individualism, in particular, market capitalism and the centralized state.
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