'Greens' are aware of the fact that as well-educated people they have never been in danger of involuntary long-term unemployment. Comfortably ensconced in tertiary education, or in the welfare or creative professions, their jobs are usually stimulating and intellectually satisfying. They can usually pay their rents and mortgages without anxiety. Few of them know what it is to lie awake at night worrying about marketing or cash-flow problems.

The result of such contradictions is that within the 'green' constituency in every industrial society there is tension and sometimes conflict between reformists and radicals. As with earlier movements such as liberalism or socialism, reformists believe that goals can be best achieved by working through the existing institutions of society, by existing administrations even, by harnessing existing forces, working with the grain of society rather than against it. Radicals believe that no good fruit can come from a rotten tree and, sometimes almost welcome impending disaster as a precondition for a new start.

Ideological differences between reformists and radicals are complicated by fragmentation. Green political movements in every country contain people who retain membership of single-cause organisations. Their activities vary from the deliberate illegality of the Californian 'monkey wrench gang' which 'decommissions' bulldozers and puts spikes in trees to sabotage saw mills, and the 'snowball' campaign in Britain which aims to get its members arrested for cutting wire fences around American defence establishments, to Conservative and 'respectable' bodies like the British Bird Protection Society or the Audubon Society and Sierra Club in the United States. For many, the 'green' slogan; 'Think globally, act locally', means preventing the dumping of nuclear waste in the vicinity of a particular English village, or stopping the woodchip industry at a particular creek in Tasmania, protesting against oil exploration off the northern Californian coast or demonstrating against a new airport runway in Frankfurt. Activity in local campaigns overlaps with a vast network of causes, both soft and good, like Amnesty International, animal liberation, Greenpeace, vegetarianism, Men of the Trees, feminism and the peace movement. '

While potentially a movement of enormous strength, the 'greens' are thus characterised by nothing so much as their diversity. The movement recognises that it must think and act in a global context, but it has so far had trouble in developing an ideology of the kind which has provided a basis of consistency for the political movements of the past with global ambitions.

This ideological imprecision may be an aspect of middle class identity. One sociological study has shown that commitment to the organisations and movements which made up the green constituency is rarely an act of rebellion. Rather, it is an extension of professional commitment to human welfare, frustrated by the constraints of industrial society (Parkin 1968). Action in favour of such causes is a way of asserting moral personality, and the common denominator which unites 'greens', is not, in spite of appearances, class or local interest, but an understanding, however differently personal priorities may be ordered, that politics is less a matter of social mechanics than of morals.

This conviction has the political consequence of leaving greens open to the charge that they do not see the politics of the environment as anything to do with conflict between classes, only as something to do with humanity versus the I rest of creation. They are therefore accused by members of existing political parties, especially those of the Left, of not having worked out ways in which proposals for environmental reform such as closing down nuclear power stations or taxing petrol will effect the old and the cold, those who may lose their jobs, or wage-earners who drive long commuting distances in their cheap-to-buy-gas-guzzlers. They are accused of thinking of the environment in a narrow preservationist sense which excludes the workplaces, city centres, and housing estates and consists only of pristine mountain ranges, rainforests, marshland, or the hedgerows of the English countryside. While the inner-city areas of Britain suffered the successive blights of 'slum clearance', unemployment, poverty and social violence in the early 1980s, says one critic, 'the mass of the environmental lobby . . . was concentrating its not inconsiderable resources upon protecting hedgerows, butterflies and bunny rabbits' (Weston 1986, p. 12.)

Some of those who seek to preserve hedgerows and bunny rabbits may do so for relatively trivial reasons, even while supporting the national economic policies which lead to their destruction. Their reasons do not therefore form part of a coherent environmentalist ethic. There can be, nevertheless, radical implications to even the safest hedgerows and bunny rabbits campaign if it is not merely the action of removing hedgerows which is questioned, but the ideology which justifies the action&emdash;the right of either profit-based capitalism or growth-oriented socialism to do what it likes with an important part of nature. To question, that is, the assumptions which make industrial society possible. Others want to preserve hedgerows from a point of view which would disappoint those who think that unemployment and poverty are more important. It arises from a rejection of the anthropocentric view of the universe and the belief that it must be respected and is derived from the ideas of Aldo Leopard and the more recent deep ecology movement. ,"'

It may be significant that the movements inspired by deep ecology and the more radical philosophies have developed chiefly in Scandinavia, California, Germany and Australia, where areas of genuine wilderness or forest are to be found, contrasting starkly in the last three cases with some of the most polluting examples of industrial development and urban conglomeration to be seen anywhere, much of it recent. The result is that though the philosophical basis of deep ecology is becoming rapidly more sophisticated than that of old-fashioned nature preservation, its political implications for humans are not dissimilar. Its logic leads to an extreme position either on the Right or the Left. This can be illustrated by comparing the careers of two of the most notable environmental radicals of recent times.

David Brower of California is seen by his supporters as a consistent champion of the environment against the compromises of the political 'realists' who have been successfully corrupted by the need to achieve 'mainstream' credibility. To others he is one who, by preferring the rights of grizzly bears, trees, condors and local eco-systems to those of humanity, has denied humans the spiritual identity which makes them, at least in their own estimation, distinctive among species. Some would argue that it is only the uniqueness of humanity among species which enables people to embrace the kind of new morality which is needed to ensure the establishment of a sustainable society.

For seventeen years Brower was director of the Sierra Club, founded in 1892, and the society which has probably done most on the American continent to make radical preservation respectable. In 1969 he was asked by the Board to resign. It cited 'general intransigence, wilful failure to follow Board directions, unauthorised expenditures', as the reason. His biographer, John McPhee 1971), portrays his defeat as a triumph for the nuclear engineers, real estate agents, publishers and lawyers whose image had been enhanced by membership of the club but who did not share its vision.

Brower then founded Friends of the Earth, a more radical and less parochial but much poorer organisation. He refused to be much troubled by its poverty while the environment was being destroyed at such a rapid rate. 'It's nice to be in the black', he said, 'but more important for the world to be in the Green' (Mother Jones, November 1986).

Friends of the Earth has cast a wide net, with branches in other affluent countries, and has conducted inspired campaigns against acid rain, nuclear arms, and James Watt, President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, whose immediate expectations of the millennium seemed likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Single issues thus dragged the organisation, not without a little screaming, into the arena of national politics, defence and development.

Brower retired as president of Friends of the Earth, but continued to suffer from what his critics saw as 'Founder's Syndrome', the inability not to interfere. He mobilised his faithful to take a radical line in the 1984 presidential election campaign and support Jesse Jackson or Barry Commoner as a Democratic presidential candidate. This effectively placed such conventional political issues as foreign policy and racial equality on the green agenda. The FOE leadership preferred to throw the weight of the organisation behind Walter Mondale, who, though no particular champion of the environment, had, they thought, a better chance of defeating the man whom they regarded as the greatest threat to the environment, Ronald Reagan.

Political 'realism' and the notion of making not just a point, but a difference, dictated a move of headquarters from San Francisco to Washington in November 1985, a move which symbolised the differences between Brower and his opponents and led to his resignation from the Board of Directors. Brower remains active within the Sierra Club, attempting to make it determine its priorities in order of environmental importance, with nuclear power and the arms race now at the top of his list of threats, as opposed to a policy of giving priority to those campaigns, usually of a more local nature, in which victory is more likely.

His own priority is now a new organisation, the Earth Island Institute, based on a crowded office, full of youth and zeal, in a San Francisco attic. Its interests are global and are thus forced to be conventionally as well as environmentally political. Its publication, the Earth Island Journal, reports, for example, on Chernobyl, the militarisation of Central America, and attempts by mining companies to extinguish the land rights of indigenous peoples. These are reported as environmental issues, but the writers do not shirk the responsibility of taking sides. Brower editorialises:

Objectivity is a threat because people think it exists and tend to believe those other people who claim to be objective and therefore free of bias . . . if you are going to try to be objective, you must be subjective in selecting what you are going to be objective about. So you start off on the wrong foot, and that wrong foot is attached to everything else in your universe' Earth Island Journal, Fall 1986, p. 2).

His radicalism is something which relates primarily to the dichotomy of nature and man, and only incidentally, though of necessity increasingly, to the dichotomies between some members of society and others. Earth First! radicals maintain that social injustice is a side-effect of a more general immorality, 'a world based upon exploitation, not only of resources, but of humans, and domination, not only of Nature, but of classes' Mother Jones, November 1986, p. 331. Socialists with environmental sympathies would question this. They would say that while the end of class exploitation would allow the possibility of an end to the exploitation of nature, the reduction of demands on nature would not necessarily mean a reduction of class exploitation. It could well increase it instead. Conditions for the poor unaccompanied by a redistribution of wealth in a society which took less from the environment, would get worse rather than better. Increasing radicalism in the man versus nature debate can thus be an alternative to a commitment to egalitarianism.

Brower's position is thus typical of those whose logic leads them in this direction even though their actions and the causes they support land them in the company of liberals, democrats and socialists. 'Friends of the Earth made the Sierra Club appear reasonable', he says, and 'Earth First! makes F.O.E. appear reasonable. Now we want some people to make Earth First! appear reasonable' Mother Jones, November 1986, p. 33).

David Brower can be understood as one whose environmental radicalism has led him towards policies which reduce the number of enemies he has on the Left and increases the number on the Right. Such are the consequences, for example, of opposing nuclear power or the sending of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. His European counterpart, in many ways, is Rudolf Bahro, who began political life as an orthodox citizen of East Germany, became is constructive critic, fled from it, and became one of the best-known critics of centralised state power, especially socialist state power, in Europe. He is also a leading exponent of the European green movement, broader in scope than its American counterpart, and because its practitioners have been involved in the day-to-day business of political debate and legislation it has been forced in the direction of consistency.

Bahro arrived in West Germany in October 1979, after his release from East Germany, where he had been imprisoned since August 1977, ostensibly for espionage, but evidently because of the publication of The Alternative in Eastern Europe (Fembach 1979), a scholarly critique of East German bureaucracy and government, and also because of press and television interviews which he had given to the West German media. He immediately became involved with the green movement and was a founder member of the political party which achieved its most spectacular success in March 1983, when it won twenty-seven seats in the Bundestag.

Debates within the party centred on the desirability of entering at all into the national parliamentary arena, and, once in that arena, on the alternatives of standing alone or of forming a coalition with one of the existing parties. If a coalition were to be formed, which party should it be formed with&emdash;the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), or the left-liberal Social Democrats (SDP)?

Bahro rapidly gravitated, not to the left of either, but to a position based on the paramouncy of the environment over the immediate interests of any particular section of the human race. His developing stance placed him in ideologically close company with the David Brower of twenty years previously. The target of his most scathing criticism has been what he calls the realos, people who in his view have a strategy of actively assisting with repairs to a system which is best left to collapse. The achievement of reforms such as the fitting of anti-pollution devices to automobile exhausts is seen by Bahro not as the tangible rewards of 'realistic' policies, but as palliatives which must be attacked because they have the effect of postponing a catastrophe which is both inevitable and desirable.

Such a philosophy is uncomfortable to a party tasting significant electoral success, and Bahro, like Brower, became, depending on your point of view, either the representative of developing extremism, or a rock of consistency standing against a current of compromise which co-opted the green movement and made it impotent as a force for change of any significance. He eventually resigned from the West German Green Party, ostensibly because of a party resolution which condoned animal experiments although only in cases where it could be shown that they had the effect of saving human life). This, he said, revealed the principle by which human beings are exterminating plants, animals and finally themselves. Not that political realism was absent, but it was a realism directed towards a new kind of constituency which had not been seen before as relevant to party politics. 'After what happened yesterday, am I still supposed to try to win serious animal protectionists over to our side?' he asked (Bahro 1986, p. 210).

The continuum from 'realist' to radical within the green movement is thus one which not only cuts across the leftright political spectrum, but extends the scope of politics itself to include intergenerational conflict and the rights of non-human species. The movement therefore includes those who despair of the politics of parliamentary democracy as a means of initiating change. 'Greenpeace', for example, uses the strategy of selecting issues likely to receive maximum public attention in order to make the largest possible number of people think about them seriously. Preferring non-violent direct action to debate, members accept the duty, Quaker-like, to 'bear witness' by the kind of well documented and publicised displays of personal courage for which they have become famous. They have placed themselves in small inflatable boats between harpoons and whales, or beneath drums of nuclear waste as they are dumped into the sea.

Most extreme on the humanity versus nature scale are, perhaps, the California-based deep ecologists Bill Devall and George Sessions. As if to chide Schumacher for writing about 'Economics as if People Mattered', the sub-title of their book, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (1985), implies that in the last analysis, people don't.

These authors define deep ecology as something which requires fundamental social change, but they argue that it does not require a political programme. It is not, they say, an attempt to add another ideology to an already crowded field, nor does it call for the overthrow of existing governments. Change will be wrought on an individual basis by those who continue to search for new ways to 'liberate the ecological consciousness'. Warwick Fox (1989), the leading Australian exponent of deep ecology takes the argument further, and, implicitly at least, into the realm of politics. He urges a redefinition of this branch of eco-philosophy as transpersonal ecology. This means that in place of a personal identification of self with family, friends, ethnic grouping, species and so on, transpersonal ecology means:

"that we strive ... not to identify ourselves exclusively with our leaf (our personal, biographic self), our twig (our family), the leaves (our friends), our minor sub-branch (our community), our major sub-branch (our race), our branch (our species), and so on, but rather to identify ourselves with the tree. This necessarily leads, at the limit, to an impartial But deeply felt identification with all particulars (all leaves on the tree)." Fox, l989.

Actions which follow from this philosophical position, he argues, include not only 'treading lightly upon the earth' but 'also actions that respectfully but resolutely attempt to alter the views and behaviour of those who persist in the delusion that self-realisation lies in the direction of dominating the earth and the myriad entities with which we co-exist' (ibid). In Europe, Bahro points out that, historically, the foundations on which new cultures have been based, following the decay or collapse of the old ones, have belonged 'to those strata of consciousness which are traditionally described as religious'. He expects that, as with Christianity in the context of the floundering Roman Empire, the international proletariat will create a higher religion, stemming from a contemporary 'peripheral culture'. He notes in this context the extent of 'development aid' in the form of spirituality currently being given by the Indian sub-continent to backpackers from the spiritually underdeveloped areas of Europe and the USA. Noting also the upsurge of Christian fundamentalism in the affluent countries, he concludes that, 'the contest with the Apocalypse can only be won if this becomes a great era of belief, a Pentecost with the living spirit poured out as equally as possible over all' (Bahro 1986, p. 188).

Even the relatively staid Green Party of Britain is eclectic in its enthusiasm, calling for a recognition of 'the right of all people to enjoy our common heritage, and to accord the right of freedom of religious expression to pagans and to all those who regard Stonehenge as a temple' (Green Party 1986). This resolution of the party conference dramatically underlines the breadth of the green constituency and the difficulty of achieving consensus, for it was the conservative and conventional National Trust and English Heritage organisations which were once again to line up behind the Thatcher government and an army of policemen to keep the 'hippy' convoy of Midsummer Day 1986 moving past Stonehenge as usual. Since then, Mrs Thatcher has proclaimed herself a convert to green values, but this has not so far resulted in a reduction of violence at this annual occasion.

While many 'greens' would question the ecological credentials of an autonomous Ulster or Alsace, and religious scholars may have difficulty in coming to serious terms with deep ecologists or British pagans, these movements are evidence of a felt need for a spiritual and cultural link with particular parts of the earth rather than the planet as a whole to provide an overriding reason for good stewardship.

What seems to be missing is an understanding of the mechanics and disciplinary implications of such links in societies which actually live by them. In spite of the young backpackers in Nepal, there is something Eurocentric if not provincial about this search for a new spirituality. More consistent, and more to the point for the purpose of maintaining a sustainable society is the ethical system, and its religious framework, of some of those peoples whose religious belief has been part of that conservatism which resists Western consumerism and remains as a flickering flame which never quite went out during the decades or even centuries of colonialism. It is likely to be revived by the discovery of new ecological reasons for having confidence in those aspects of traditional culture which are not yet discarded, and could make a useful contribution to a global ethical consensus. To use Warwick Fox's analogy, it is specifically because of the definition of self in terms of adjacent leaves on the tree, rather than the broader, but inevitably less powerful identification with the tree as a whole, that results in an ecologically responsible ethic.

Central to the ethical system of all peoples whose relationship with the land has remained close is the attachment of great importance to kinship and the obligations which go with it. These involve primary obligations to particular ancestors, not merely to ancestors in general, the duty to honour them by using the land wisely for the continuous fulfilment of obligations to particular members of contemporary society. This of itself is a guarantee that the method of use will be sustainable so that resources can be passed on, undiminished in value, to children in the future. It is such finite ground rules which give rise to principles of loyalty and reciprocation, of obligation to ancestors and to children in general, and to less tangible feelings of identity with particular landscapes and regions and with the specific spirituality which defines cultural identity. Ideology thus arises from ground rules of environmental management, not, usually, the other way round, through exhortation or inspirational 'conversion'.

Transposed into the context of modern industrial civilisation, this makes the extended family an excellent basic unit of a sustainable society, and though less reliable, the nuclear family is probably better than none at all. Greens should therefore be wary of joining in the current enthusiasm for its demise see, for example, Davis et al. 1980). Those who preach the virtues of the small co-operative commune or who call, as Bahro does, for a new 'Benedictine order' of both men and women who will 'give space to the uninhibited development of sensuality and sexuality' (Bahro 1986, pp. 90-1) as the social basis of the new order would do well to study the well-ordered life of a communal society based on kinship, such as the Fijian mataqali or land-owning unit. It has a complex code of personal conduct, of familiarity and avoidance, deference and responsibility. The rules have developed as a balance between the disruptive and cohesive forces in society and between society and its local environment.

Christianity has often succeeded best in such societies when it has been successful in arresting the process of cultural disintegration at the hands of the forces of colonialism. Often it has rescued traditional morality and customary behaviour from the disruptive consequences of transition from a 'closed' to an 'open' society, in which change becomes an acceptable consequence of human activity (Jarvie 1964). Nacalieni Rika (l974), for example, a Fijian teacher speaking at a conference on development, argued that the obligations of kinship were too valuable to be thrown aside as obstacles to progress. Urbanisation and the institutional isolation of the two-child family had led to the deprivation of wider associations and threatened to undermine the morality which was needed to sustain them.

The Californian Earth First! deep ecologist who seeks a spiritual basis for a desire to protect the environment thus stands, in some respects, on the opposite side of a moral divide from millions of people in poor countries who have the spiritual confidence he or she seeks. These millions would certainly share many Earth First! criticisms of industrial society, but they would probably reverse the Earth First! order of priorities. They would place particular people first, then categories of people defined in terms of relationships, and including living, dead and future generations, then other species, hence the eco-systems of which people form a part, and without whose health human obligations cannot be fulfilled.

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