Ebook: The Coming of the Greens

[rear cover blurb:]
"Wimpy burgers go vegetarian. A blockbuster movie is devoted to saving the whales. Holistic therapies get a royal seal of approval. Are these the first signs of a gentle Green revolution taking place because of the unprecedented ecological crisis which confronts us? Or just the face of the latest fad?

The Coming of the Greens examines how Green thinking has begun to influence all aspects of our society in the last few years - from Hollywood to health food stores, from organized religion to the boardrooms of industry and big business.

Jonathon Porritt, author of the influential "Seeing Green" and director of Friends of the Earth, explores the increasing concern about the environment. Together with journalist David Winner, he shows how the burgeoning interest in alternative medicine, lifestyles and attitudes to work has affected the arts, media and politics, and puts the British experience in the context of the growth of the international Green movement. Including interviews with politicians, activists, writers and artists such as Ken Livingstone, Fay Weldon, Anita Roddick, Harold Evans and Julie Christie, "The Coming of the Greens" sorts out the significant from the merely fashionable and answers the question: how deep is the Green revolution going?"


"THE SPD INTENDS TO MAKE COMMON CAUSE WITH THESE PEOPLE: the Greens call themselves the Party of Life. They are not.

1. The Greens want to replace nuclear power by coal-powered stations immediately, i.e. to increase air pollution by 1.4 billion tonnes. That is a death sentence for our forests.

2. The Greens want to legalize drug-taking. Thus hundreds of thousands of young people will be led to ruin and destroyed physically and mentally at an early age.

3 The Greens defame our police as a 'civil war army', and want to do away with the police force. Breach of the peace will no longer be punishable. Anarchists and radicals will rampage through our streets plundering and destroying.

4 The Greens believe imprisonment is inhumane and want to abolish prisons. Murderers, sex offenders etc. will then walk around in freedom.

5 The Greens intend to legalize all abortions prior to birth. That is absolutely inhuman.

6 The Greens did not demonstrate against the Soviet Union over Chemobyl, which shows they are not interested in life so much as in crippling our energy supplies.

[Etc., etc.]"

--p214.


"According to David Pepper, in his book "The Roots of Modern Environmentalism", Greens see 'present environmental dilemmas in terms of fixed and unchanging natural limits upon human action. This determinist stance leads to fatalism and a pessimism about man's ability to create harmony with nature through enlightened social reform. This is politically reactionary.' The whole approach of the Green Movement is thus 'deeply conservative'. It 'advocates measures which strengthen social "order" and "stability" and negates the importance of class struggle and the need for revolution'."
--p.256


(Reference numbers for Chapter Twelve show compositor's error in the paper edition; digitiser added reference numbers to page footers to facilitate locating them. Interestingly publication of this book in 1988 (second impression 1989) coincided with the so-called fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites, in fact likely a planned measure to facilitate the aim of global government by 'toning down' communism).