Green Party

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See Green Party of the United States or State Green Parties for specific parties that run candidates in elections in the United States.

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Green

Politically, the term Green is often used to describe the environmental movement and its supporters. It has been adopted by the Green parties, which focus on environmentalism but connect it to many other issues. See green politics. As the only political theory to have emerged in the post-WWII period in the developed nations, and also the only one to have generated political parties in over a hundred countries on Earth in that time, the movement is very noteworthy, and requires some study to be well understood:

Ideology

All Green Parties share a commitment to the so-called Four Pillars of the Green Party which were defined in the 1980s for all Greens globally as:

Recently sustainability and diversity have been emphasized as goals, by the Global Greens in particular. There is a very wide range of views on the meaning of these terms. In particular the quoted terms are disputed. There is much less debate on what constitutes ecological wisdom since there is a science of ecology to refer to, and a scientific method to answer hard questions about ecosystems. And while peacemaking can be objectively defined in many cases, "peace" itself (or "nonviolence", cannot be.

Socialist?

In North America, perhaps due to a lack of informal community mechanisms to deal with common lands and waters, most of these parties emphasize egalitarianism in all aspects of society. Those coming from fading socialist and communist movements will often, again hypocritically, advocate violence to create equal outcomes even among people of very different ecological impacts, e.g. a guaranteed minimum cash income for all. These are often referred to as watermelon Greens.

While influenced by these advocates, some of the more moderate have been instrumental in promoting well-being indicators for government action. This is the "classical" view of what government exists for: to promote citizens' well being. In this respect Greens are no different from classical liberals or social democrats, except insofar as they propose more mechanisms for measurement.

Capitalist?

By contrast, the so-called turquoisie or blue-green or eco-capitalist factions tend to avoid top-down indicators and explicit social goals. They emphasize personal responsibility for decisions, and paying for damage done, by such means as emissions quotas or ecological footprint measurements. Some of their goals include eliminating subsidies that governments give to the oil and gas industry, or auto industry, or nuclear power generators, and charging fair prices to replace public forests cut by logging companies.

Co-operation?

The geo-libertarians, small but influential, focus on land value tax and community-scale cooperation. They work closely with libertarians especially on local issues, and often advocate joint Green-Libertarian or (in Canada) Green-Marijuana party actions and initiatives.

"Greens and Libertarians. The yin and yang of our political future", by Dan Sullivan, appeared in Green Revolution, Volume 49, No. 2, summer, 1992, and was influential in the development of this doctrine of convergence between Green and Libertarian goals. Since then, the Green Party of the United States and Libertarian Party of the United States have cooperated on some procedural issues, notably challenge to the two-party system dominating the U.S.A., and subjecting all parties to having their votes counted by Diebold, a secretive company with strong Republican Party ties.

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This page was last modified 00:20, 11 February 2007 by Dr Richard Lawson. Based on work by J. M. Branum and dKosopedia user(s) Powerofpie, Greensboro, Allamakee Democrat, Anonymous troll, Mista saki, Neutron, Jbwinste and KansasNate. Content is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.