widely regarded as a legitimate alternative to all the traditional political parties.
Broadly, environmentalism refers to a political stance in which economic
growth is regarded as much less important than the protection of standards
often referred to as ‘the quality of life’. In practice environmentalists tend to be
in favour of pollution controls, even if these reduce economic productivity,
and, in general, opposed to the development of new extractive industries,
nuclear power and large-scale industrial expansion. Several European countries
now have well-organized environmentalist parties, often referred to or titled
Green, which regularly attain as much as 5% of the vote at general elections
and, where thevoting systemallows, achieve minor representation in
legislative chambers. For example, Die Gru ̈nen (the German Green party,
founded in 1980) maintained a particularly high profile in the 1980s and, at
La ̈nder (state) level has even shared power with the Social Democratic Party of
Germany (SPD). In the United Kingdom the Green Party (founded as the
Ecology Party in 1973, changing its name in 1985) has never won any but the
most minor elections, largely due to the first-past-the-post system; never-
theless, at the 1989 elections to the European Parliament, the party was the
beneficiary of one of the British electorate’s periodic ‘protest’ votes, gaining
15% of the vote and outpolling the traditional third party, the Liberal Demo-
crats, before returning to figures of 1%–2% in opinion polls. In Eastern Europe,
environmentalist groups were at the forefront of opposition to the crumbling
communist regimes, and the subsequent revelations of widespread pollution on
an even greater scale than realized previously confirmed the potential force of
single issue politics when the need is sufficiently great. So great was opposition
to the environmental damage done by these regimes that some of the successor
states have written environmental rights into their constitutions.
Although a concern for environmentalist values in itself hardly constitutes an
organized set of policies for governing a society, many other policies which
have a psychological rather than logical link to the central concern are
espoused. Thus policies likeindustrial democracy, liberalization of laws
on private morality, and often a considerable degree ofpacifism, are associated
politically with the main ecological-protection thrust (seegreen socialism).
At its most fervent, environmentalism becomes a considered economic-
technological policy of opposition to economic growth and commitment to
a much simpler and less materially-affluent socio-economic system, through
well-argued fears of depletion of world resources. However, since the 1980s
parties across the political spectrum, perhaps alerted equally by the growing
popularity of environmental groupings and the warnings of long-term ecolo-
gical damage from scientists, have adopted ‘green’ policies. For the environ-
mentalist parties, the result of this, together with the reluctance of the vast
majority of those in modern developed societies to voluntarily accept a decline
in material wealth, will probably be that they never achieve any considerable
Environmentalism