ABSTRACT
The Schwarzes ask: ‘How do we start? By what imaginable transition can we move from here to a green future? Can the immense gap at least be narrowed, between the Green-thinking dreamers and the present reality?’ (Schwarz and Schwarz, 1987, p. 253). Ecologism provides us with a critique of current patterns of production and consumption, and the Schwarzes’ ‘Green-thinking dreamers’ have painted pictures of the sustainable society they would like us to inhabit. Two of the classic requirements of a functional definition of ‘ideology’ are thus far fulfilled by ecologism: it has a description (which is already an interpretation) of ‘political reality’, and it has a prescription for the future, which amounts to a description of the Good Life. In the light of the space between the former and the latter, the primary question addressed in this chapter is: ‘What is ecologism’s strategy for social change?’ The subsidiary question posed is: ‘Will this strategy (or these strategies) do the job required of them?’
