“Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”
The above quote is attributed to Chico Mendes, the great Brazilian trade union leader who was murdered in 1988 for non-violent organising to create better working conditions for his members, preserve the Amazon rainforest and protect the land rights of its inhabitants. The spirit of Green politics can be found right here in the critical intersection of social justice, economic democracy and ecological wisdom reflected in this Mendes quote, and Green Isles takes its founding inspiration from it.
Green Isles is the place for radical thinking about how our Green movement can challenge the mainstream conversations and economic concensus that have bought the UK to a place of gross inequality, a woeful response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, obscene levels of poverty and insecurity and the corresponding rise of fascism, and a creaking democracy that seems unable or unwilling to address these multiple crises.
More than ever we need voices that recognises that these crises are intimately connected, that they stem from a political economy that treats social injustice, environmental degradation and political crisis as separate issues to be managed rather than symptoms of an economic and political system that needs fundamental transformation.
A different kind of politics
Green politics offers something our current political discourse desperately lacks: a coherent framework that understands how everything connects. How energy bills relate to corporate power. How housing policy is climate policy. How genuine democracy might look beyond Westminster. How kindness might be reassembled in our political economy. How justice, economics and ecology are inseparable.
As old certainties crumble, more people are asking the questions Green politics and progressive thinkers have been asking for decades: What if we centred people, communities and nature in our economy, rather than prioritising endless growth for the sake of it? What if we distributed democratic and economic power to communities? What if society was shaped to work within planetary boundaries rather than as a system that can literally only exist by trashing them?
However, while mainstream political conversations reflect dominant ideas of destructive neoliberal economics, Green thinking remains largely marginalised. Furthermore, Green politics is often accused of lacking a coherent ideology, or a class analysis.
Far from it. As a movement, we are building Green institutions of bold thinking, of community activism, of economic change and of the political courage to take our ideas forward.
What We’re Building
Green Isles is independent of any political Party, but a place to discuss underlying theories and ideas of our Green thinking, a place to challenge the unspoken assumptions implicit in mainstream political discussions in the UK. This will be a space for rigorous thinking and bold imagination. For connecting the dots between seemingly separate crises. For remembering that politics is supposed to be about how we live together, not just who governs us.
We will be outward facing, speaking to anyone seeking alternatives to the status quo. But we’ll also be inward-looking, providing a space for the movement itself to think harder, argue better, and develop the ideas that will shape Britain’s future, rooted in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland while critically engaging with the Republic.
We’ll explore political ecology, an analysis of power relations in human-nature relations and a fundamental tool in the continuing evolution of Green politics – indeed, Green politics and ecosocialism could be described as the real-world application of political ecology.
And along the way we’ll also look at the origins and principles of Green politics, begin to imagine what Green state governance might look like, set out why, in the era of inequality and climate breakdown, Green politics is class politics, and much more.
It’s later than we think. The political centre is failing. Communities across thethe UK are ready for something different. And Green politics is the essential framework for class struggle, survival and flourishing on these green isles in the turbulent decades ahead.
