Can we combine our disparate networks–the peace, ecological, feminist, communal,health, educational, and cooperative–into a common interlinking coalition to provide a working example of what it means to literally “Green America,” to use Charles Reich’s uniquely relevant phrase of the last Sixties? Can we put aside careerist ambitions, personality frictions, dogmatic disputes, Thirties and Sixties-type Cold War politics,Third World posturing and verbiage? Can we create the beginnings of a decentralized but interlocked coalition –yes, a Green Coalition–that will avoid top-down party structures and parliamentary fiascos to win our communities to the ideal of a new libertarian populism?
Above all, we have to back out of the tunnels that separate us and open our eyes toa broader vista of social change. It’s time to realize that people who love liberty arepeople who love peace, and people who love peace are people who love a healthyenvironment and fecund nature. With these simple premises to unite us, we may yet stop the militaristic, dogmatic, and authoritarian forces that seek to devour our future. Short of this promising path, we have every reason to believe that tunnel-vision may become real tunnels in which we will be buried as irrevocably as cadavers in the biocidal cemetary of an ecologically lifeless and radioactive world.
This article originally appeared in Utne Reader‘s Summer 1984 issue as a sidebar to Greening the Whole Earth: Germany and the Greens. For more similar, see The Surfacing of Postmodernity, Green Politics in the United States, and Shifting Power from Federal Government to Bioregions.
