Utopianism and Green Politics

I travelled to Norwich for the second time during May. This time it's not for political campaigning, instead I headed to UEA to listen to Jonathan Porritt deliver a lecture in a series called Philosopher Kings. porritt's theme was "Utopianism and Green Politics"

In the late 1980s when I started researching environmental policies and politics while working for a MEP on the European parliament's Environment Committee, Jonathan Porritt was very much the public face of the English Greens.

While the German Greens were making electoral headway in a country with a proportional system, Porritt appeared to plough fallow land back home. In 1989 in the Euro elections the greens polled 15% of the vote, but with the UK still rooted to FPTP for Euro elections at this time, they won no seats.

Over 20 years have passed, and I spent the two hour train journey reading Porritt's "Going Green". Obviously the book is to an extent time framed, but it is a readable account with sharp observation.
Before the evening I sense that Porritt while maintaining his membership of the party seemed rather tangential to it, and its leftward path under the leadership of Caroline Lucas.

Porritt's talk was always thought provoking, never allowing the listener to settle into their comfort zone. He challenged a largely green sympathetic audience of approaching 300 , to ask why their message had not created a positive narrative with the electorate. He argued that as a party we failed to appreciate or accept the aspirations of the people. It was no good simply blaming FPTP.

He said that the bulk of the population accept the environmental problems that the earth faces, but not our solutions.He challenged orthodox views on technology. Could technology be the friends of the Greens ? All to often he said we appeared either technosceptic or worse technophobic.

Of course from a green perspective technology can't resolve all environmental problems unless consumption is tackled as well. In reply Rupert Reed argued that it wasn't greens who were utopian, it was those who thought we could continue on with the "business as usual" approach. He talked of "unspeak", the development of language and concepts that imply that it is possible to tackle issues such as climate change without drastic action, the term "sustainability" he argued was a perfect example of "unspeak". While accepting that Greens are often seen as foretellers of doom,he said we needed to raise the alarm, rather than simply being alarmist.

Rupert Reed  pursued the view that growth offered no solutions, that more stuff was no solution.
As I travelled back to Essex, this theme held my attention. I tried to think through the contradiction. At first glance people do want more stuff, especially in the field of technology, how can the Greens sell their message when coming up against what seemed a huge barrier ?

The more I thought, the underlying issue seemed to be the reduction in the size of public as opposed to private provision. Today culturally we've accepted that the public provision won't be there, so we seek out private solutions. In the days before the Porritt lecture I wanted to prepare myself by reading some of his writing. Did I go to the local library ? No, I bought the book (admittedly second hand). On our allotment I had a discussion regarding grass strimmers. The ones the allotment holders buy are next to useless, and are anyway underused. Why don't we club together and buy a quality tool, that we can all access ? As I got off the late night train  people left public transport that was both efficient and clean, and jumped into their private cars. Why ? Because the idea of late night rural public transport would be considered unrealistic in the UK.

Until we tackled the lack of community and public provision, together with the distribution of wealth in our society, our hopes of opening the electorates' eyes to the limits of growth will be a utopian dream.