AH Challenge: Earlier Greens

HueyLong

Banned
Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to have a semi-large, coherent political grouping (preferably organized in parties, but something like the Fabian society would work) analogous to modern Greens arise in the United States or Europe before 1900.

You may think its impossible, but look at some of the trends we saw. The rise of Romanticism and its love of nature. The scientific conservation movement. The beginnings of some of the disastrous industrial practices.

Some of my thoughts on the idea:

Romanticism will be at the core, I think. Mystics and nature-as-god type people. Mainly because they will be more likely to follow a far from victory party or movement, at least more than the rational conservationists of the time.

Zero waste makes sense as a business practice- while not entirely feasible this early, it should be noted that there were no or limited plastics (harder to recycle) and that glass and paper could be recycled easily during the era (But no one bothered to on a large scale)

These Greens may be more deserving of a Luddite title than modern Greens- efforts may be made to revert to water power in the United States, at the least, at a time when it was becoming inefficient. But then, they may be more progressive, as the environmental effects of dams and the like were not yet known or popularized. Certainly going to oppose coal power, may support cleaner burning petroleum in an almost-ironic twist.

The movement will likely have ties with "back-to-the-land" movements of the period- they may have similar goals. The various scouting movements could make a good youth wing. Programs similar to the CCC's tree planting may be likely.

So, while I may have some idea of how their ideas will shape up, I have little idea of how to get those ideas to coalesce and form a grouping. And thus is your challenge.

Go.
 

oberdada

Gone Fishin'
no way,
you are completely ignoring the social and democratic parts of the green movement, those were compleetly occupied by the socialists in the late 19. century, as well as the nuclear power and feminist issues, to early for them too.
 

HueyLong

Banned
And that would be why it is a challenge..... and why they are only vaguely similar to modern Greens- they can be seen as an AH predecessor.
 
Some alternate strain of physiocracy, perhaps?

Biophysical Economics: From Physiocracy to Ecological Economics and Industrial Ecology said:
In the 1750s there developed in France a school of economic thought which had as its first principle that natural resources, and fertile agricultural land in particular, were the source of material wealth. Physiocracy, meaning literally ‘rule of nature,’ is generally acknowledged as the first organized scientific school of economic thought (Neill, 1949). Led by Francois Quesnay (1758) and his disciples (Mirabeau, 1763; Dupont, 1768), the Physiocrats maintained that the economic process could be understood by focusing on a single physical factor: the productivity of agriculture.
 
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