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criticism on board witness the Friends of the Earth s Cities for
People campaign but there is still a sense in which Weston s critique
speaks past the movement rather than to it. Greens have a very good
reason for referring so often to the biospherical environment: they are
concerned for its survival as a long-term supporter of human and non-
human life. From this perspective (eco)socialists are right to ask greens
to reassess their understanding of the environment , but wrong to ask
them to focus on inner city environments if the recipes for them are not
placed in the context of the search for a sustainable society.
Socialists (and others) will argue, in any case, that there is no such
thing as nature unmediated by human beings, and therefore no great
Ecologism and other ideologies 171
difference between the urban environment and the environment created
by farmed land or deforestation: social relations and the capitalist
mode of production that underpins them produce the environment.
Green exhortations to protect or conserve the environment betray
the unfounded impression that there is an untouched nature alongside
the areas already corrupted by human beings, and it is this untouched
nature that receives the movement s greatest attention. Pepper writes
that [T]here is not a self-contained humanity counterpoised to and
ever battling with a self-contained non-human world but rather each
is part of a unity that is composed of contradictory opposites
(Pepper, 1993a, p. 440), and that the ecocentric view regarding our
supposed alienation from nature is internally self-contradictory, since it
rests on a dualistic conception of the human nature relationship: a
conception it is supposed to reject (ibid., p. 443).
Again, I think that this speaks past the radical green point rather
than to it. Both Marxism and deep ecology are types of monism, of
course, but all monists separate out parts of the common substance for
different purposes. It is no contradiction to hold a monist view regard-
ing the nature of things and to simultaneously distinguish between
human and non-human nature (indeed, Pepper himself continually
does so). Even Spinoza, perhaps the most thoroughgoing monist of
them all, allows for two attributes (thought and extension) of a single
substance (Spinoza, 1677/1955). Marxists will make the distinction
within their monism in order, then, to theorize the dialectical relation
between the social and natural (nearly always, for socialists, in inverted
commas) worlds. Deep ecologists will distinguish within their monism,
for example, so as to talk of the ethical relationship which should hold
between human and non-human nature.
Socialists, in any case, will argue that an awareness of the social
construction of the environment would have three effects: first, it would
lead to a healthy widening of green activity; second, it would promote
an understanding of the capitalist roots of environmental decay both
in the countryside and in the cities; and third, it would improve the
chances of the green movement obtaining a mass following.
This latter point needs some explanation. Joe Weston argues that the
green movement as currently constituted is an expression of the ennui
of a particular section of the middle classes the professional, educated
section. Green politics is an attempt to protect the values rather than
simply the economic privilege of a social group which rejects the
market-orientated politics of capitalism and the materialistic analysis
made of it by Marxists (Weston, 1986, p. 27). These values are
reflected, partly, in the green definitions of the environment most often
172 Green Political Thought
advanced by the movement, referred to above. To the extent that this is
a political perspective which is specific to a particular social group
(ibid., p. 28) and, moreover, a social group that is of limited size, no
mass movement can be formed around it. On this reading ecologism
will not progress beyond its minority, subordinate status until it speaks
to the kinds of environmental problems suffered by masses of people,
and that means developing ways to conceptualise and represent eco-
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