UNDERCURRENTS  ECOSOPHY

Major parts of the environmental movement are not just separate from a holistic worldview, but are actively pushing in the opposite direction

Wild Goose Chase (etching) by Fiona Watson www.flickr.com/photos/fiona-watson-art

A Shared Vision When such eco-pioneers as Greenpeace have somewhat lost their way, it is clear that it is time to regroup, writes Rupert Read

Is there an environmental movement?

The direct question of whether there actually is an environmental movement – provocative as it is – already seems to me to contain a mistake. The word ‘environment’ suggests, dangerously, that what we are about is preserving something outside of us, something else. But actually, the so-called environmental movement is also very much about preserving ourselves; we are not distinct from the ecosystems that we depend upon and without which we are nothing. We are not separate from them. So we should stop talking about ‘the environmental movement’. We should talk instead about the ecological movement, or perhaps the green movement. So then the question should be: “Is there an ecological movement?”

Or are the diverse would-be elements of ‘it’ – the conservation charities, the ‘development’ NGOs, the Green Party, myriad grassroots initiatives, direct-action groups such as Climate Camp – are these elements in fact so diverse and so disunified that there is too little unity for us to talk, really, of the ecological movement at all?

I suspect that that is so. That there isn’t really an ecological movement as such, in Britain – or indeed in the world – today. Merely fragments.

Now some might say that this is no bad thing. Let a hundred flowers bloom, they would say. But I think that the situation is more serious. Because some major parts of what our movement is (if there is one at all) are not just separate from the kind of holistic worldview that is to be found

46 Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2012