Green political thoughtphysical surroundings and, therefore, able to cohabit more harmoniously
with natural landscapes.^8
Decentralisation may be a necessary condition for participatory democ-
racy, but there is no guarantee that a decentralised society will be demo-
cratic. Sale ( 1980 ) concedes that a society based on a natural bioregion may
not always be characterised by democratic or liberal values because another
‘natural’ principle, diversity, implies that bioregional societies should boast
awide range of political systems, some of which, presumably, might be
authoritarian. Even if the political system is democratic, there may be draw-
backs about life in a small community. Social control mechanisms may
prove oppressive if, as Goldsmith et al. ( 1972 ) suggest, offenders are brought
toheel by the weight of public opinion. Discrimination against minorities
or non-conformist opinion may be rife. Small parochial societies may also
be intellectually and culturally impoverished, perhaps reducing innovation
in clean technologies (Frankel 1987 ). So, ironically, the homogeneous decen-
tralised society may lack the diversity that ecologists value.
Another difficulty with decentralisation is that many environmental prob-
lems are best dealt with at the national or international level. Global
commons problems do not respect the political boundaries between exist-
ing nation states, let alone small bioregions. Problems such as climate
change and ozone depletion require co-ordinated action across communities
and nations, which implies international co-operation between centralised
nation states (see Chapter9). The green slogan ‘Think global, act local’ may
therefore provide an inadequate strategy for dealing with problems of the
global commons. Relying on local communities alone to protect the envi-
ronment assumes that the local community has full knowledge about the
causes, impact and solutions to a particular problem; even then, it ‘makes
sense only when the locals possess an appropriate social and ecological con-
sciousness’ (Eckersley 1992 :173).
Greens counter this criticism by stressing that they advocate decentral-
isation to the lowest ‘appropriate’ level of government (Schumacher 1975 ;
Porritt 1984 ). If local communities need to co-ordinate action to deal with
transboundary problems, greens insist they must do so ‘as independent
agents negotiating arrangements that are mutually agreeable to all con-
cerned’ (Goodin 1992 :152). Underpinning most ‘ecoanarchist’ accounts is a
deep distrust of the state (Bookchin 1989 ;seealso Barry1999a:ch.4), which
leads them to reject a central co-ordinating agency that could encroach on
thesovereignty of the autonomous decentralised community. Thus Bookchin
(1989)talks of a ‘humanly scaled, self-governing municipality freely and con-
federally associated with other humanly scaled, self-governing municipali-
ties’ (p. 182).
There are many reasons why this response is flawed. What if the com-
munities are unwilling to act? Co-operationwithina community may not
result in a benevolent attitude towards the outside world. Small parochial
communities often define themselves by reference to those outside, so they