ABSTRACT
Introduction Ideologies are sets of principles or ideas which can help us to organise our world. Often, they are regarded as common sense; they can simplify things and, at times, reduce the need to think. This can be harmful: the appalling consequences of a blind commitment to ideology are the twentieth century’s concentration camps. Green thinking has until recently been about the future, creating a world which is much more in harmony with nature. To simplify a complicated issue, we can say that there are two possible responses to the ecological crisis facing humankind. One is denial: carry on consuming, carry on having fun and forget about our responsibility for the future. Or, we can imagine a green future where nature would not be subjected to a daily assault from humankind’s cars, planes and way of life and where animals would not be slaves to the dinner plate mentality of human beings. There is much green thinking which takes this position, but in a variety of ways and from a number of different starting points. In some ways, green thought is the obvious successor to the socialism and communism of the twentieth century. Inspired by these ideologies,
millions of people worked to realise a society where there would be a fair distribution of goods and services, and often this would just mean that there would be simply enough to eat. Frequently, they would be dismissed as idealists, and the most common response was that these ideas were impractical and went against human nature. In this chapter, we will examine a range of ideologies, most of which would have this charge levelled against them as well as ideologies which are more pragmatic. The latter have been mixed with contemporary political ideas on the Right and the Left so that they represent subsets of liberalism, socialism or conservatism. This chapter examines the roots of green thinking and then outlines the forms that green thought has taken in the contemporary world.
