Uhura's Mazda
Banned
@BrotherSideways
At the moment, it's hard to think of a First World country where a Green Party isn't experiencing some degree of success. Obviously, it hasn't always been this way, and Green politics seems to have taken off mostly in the last decade or two.
Could this have been avoided altogether, or remained a fad? The first entrance of Greens into a national legislature was at the Belgian election of 1981, with the German Greens bringing the movement into prominence in 1983. However, it has been remarked that the global movement was on the decline by 1986, when Chernobyl thrust Greens into the mainstream. Would a world with no Chernobyl disaster have seen a decline in Green politics? Would we now be periodically reminded of those few years in the 80s when people who cared about the environment were silly enough to form dedicated parties instead of simply working through existing structures?
Or was the momentum already too strong by then? Are we looking at a PoD in the 70s, or '68?
And in a world where Green political parties don't get traction, what would we have instead? The predecessors of GroenLinks in the Netherlands included a Christian environmentalist party, the Pacifist Socialist Party and some rather limp Communists, while that niche in Italy seems to have been filled in the 1980s by the Radical Party, and in Australia the Nuclear Disarmament Party saw some success. It appears that there is a constituency of people who want to devolve power to the grassroots, get rid of nuclear weapons and engage in radical social liberalism, whether or not there is an environmental message as well. Does this reading tally with reality?
What are your reckons?
At the moment, it's hard to think of a First World country where a Green Party isn't experiencing some degree of success. Obviously, it hasn't always been this way, and Green politics seems to have taken off mostly in the last decade or two.
Could this have been avoided altogether, or remained a fad? The first entrance of Greens into a national legislature was at the Belgian election of 1981, with the German Greens bringing the movement into prominence in 1983. However, it has been remarked that the global movement was on the decline by 1986, when Chernobyl thrust Greens into the mainstream. Would a world with no Chernobyl disaster have seen a decline in Green politics? Would we now be periodically reminded of those few years in the 80s when people who cared about the environment were silly enough to form dedicated parties instead of simply working through existing structures?
Or was the momentum already too strong by then? Are we looking at a PoD in the 70s, or '68?
And in a world where Green political parties don't get traction, what would we have instead? The predecessors of GroenLinks in the Netherlands included a Christian environmentalist party, the Pacifist Socialist Party and some rather limp Communists, while that niche in Italy seems to have been filled in the 1980s by the Radical Party, and in Australia the Nuclear Disarmament Party saw some success. It appears that there is a constituency of people who want to devolve power to the grassroots, get rid of nuclear weapons and engage in radical social liberalism, whether or not there is an environmental message as well. Does this reading tally with reality?
What are your reckons?
