ABSTRACT
The Green movement has been defined as ruralist, concerned not just with environmental quality but with promoting a way of life close to the land. Peasant revolutionaries from John Ball (d. 1381) in the thirteenth century to the Chartist Fergus O’Connor (17941855) have called for radical land reform. In Eastern Europe peasant parties, organized in a ‘Green International’, with similar demands were prominent in the 1920s, and land reform was one of Gandhi’s principal concerns while campaigning to remove the British from India. The movement for allotments and the current practice of situating city farms in depressed urban areas are relatively modern remnants of a vigorous ‘back to the land’ campaign.
