Looking back at the Green Movement

For the past couple of weeks I've been reading the Silent Spring. Rachel Carson wrote this book in 1962. It therefore celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It is often cited as the work that kick started the ecology movement.

Carson controversially at the time spoke out about the impact of pesticides upon the wider environment. In short the killing of bad bugs by the use of DDT and other chemicals, killed much more besides. I can only imagine the reaction in the industrial world to her research and the wave of publicity unleashed when her work was serialised in the New Yorker in June '62. Here was a woman challenging the dominant view of science and industry at a time when women were expected to conform and not be heard.

The dominant theme of the Silent Spring is that man can not control nature, she regards the assertion that they can as arrogant and the attempt as futile. In short science is turning deadly weapons not only against insects but upon the earth itself.

Carson explains using applied Darwinism, that nature will fight back. She accurately predicted that insects would become resistant to the very chemicals being sprayed. Nature will always fight back.

Books can change the world, or rather the ideas contained within them can.
Marx, Darwin , it is no exaggeration to put Carson with such company. Tragically Rachel Carson died of cancer shortly after the book's publication. Her legacy however is an international movement with many strands determined to defend the planet and ensure its survival for future generations.

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Another day and another book, and I've turned to the Life and Death of Petra Kelly (by Sara Parkin). Kelly was in many ways the first Green politician I became aware of during the late 1980's.

Ironically today I find myself sitting and writing in a cafe in Surbiton in Surrey. In the 1970s in Britain going green was synominous with the TV programme "The Good Life". The central characters Tom & Barbara Good have abandonned the rat race and materialism and have decided to become self sufficient, converting their garden into a small holding. The setting for this experiment is Surbiton, the epitomy of middle class surburbia, a part of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.. Ironically today this is the parliamentary constituency of Ed Davey,the minister responsible for Climate Change.

In its own way the Good Life poses an interesting question for Greens, to what extent can a person opt out of materialism and the industrial age. What impact do individual acts such as abandonning consumerism help in tackling the environmental problems facing the world.

On a July morning the chance of meeting a Tom Good in Surbiton seemed as likely as meeting Tom Joad in Oklahoma; yet the ghost of Tom Good set my mind wondering over two pots of tea and a piece of flapjack as I passed the morning away.