What if the Greens achieved power?
Richard Swift investigates the obstacles to a Green politics.

The Greenpeace media machine
Eric Draper on media-genic environmentalists.

Everything in its place
The bioregional approach to decision-making.

Polluting the poor
Khor Kok Peng on the necessity of being Green in the Third World.

Greening the Left
Diana Johnston argues for an eco-socialism.

Green Politics - the facts

Eco-feminism
Caroline Merchant on women's action to save the environment.

The ideological battle
Debbie Bookchin explores the dilemmas facing West Germany's Greens.

Action directory

SIMPLY. The Green Agenda

Grow your own dollars
Dick Racey rethinks money and its purpose.

Some magazines thrive on giving you the illusion that they are where the action is. Others take you 'behind the scenes'. Still others probe in-depth with long investigative articles. But a good deal of this is 'smoke and mirrors' to give the reader or viewer the sense that they are being given a special form of insight. Much as it would be nice to kid ourselves, NI does not stand above the fray. We have to compete for your attention and your money so we have developed our own tricks. NJ thrives on the illusion that you are getting a comprehensive view of a particular subject shoved through your mailbox every month. But how total is our coverage of a particular subject? Is it a 32-page sleight-of-hand?

Take this issue on the Greens for example. I have found it a slippery subject to get a hold of. Every Green I talked to had a substantially different perception, not only of where the movement should be going but also of how it should be getting there. Most Greens do not like politics - at least the way it is presently conducted - and who can blame them? They are a kind of anti-party' party.

So how to go about doing an issue on a subject so hard to a get a fix on? Well I have done what every other journalist ends up doing - although few will admit it. I have chosen those facts and emphasized those themes that support my own views. Take the 'Simply' section on page 22 of this issue. I have not included several parts of the Green agenda which many Greens might well have gone for. I have left out mysticism and a return to the ancient folklores: very popular in some Green circles, but not with me.

Nor have I paid much attention in this issue to a view quite prominent among Greens that Nature is pure and that the main problem is that human beings see themselves as the centre of the universe. I frankly think that politics (and Green politics is no different) is about how human beings order their affairs and not about the moral superiority of one species over another. Are wolves superior to human beings? I don't know and I don't care.

So to a large extent, and I hope I have not done too much damage to the facts, I have emphasized what I approve of in Green politics; the decentralization of power, the challenge to an economic growth without purpose. I have not really dealt with appropriate technologies or the experiences of small alternative eco-communities - not because I don't think that they are important but because there was just no room. So much for being comprehensive. Next month another editor will be just as arbitrary with a different subject. But what facts will they select and what questions won't they ask?

My fellow editors on the Oxford side of the Atlantic (I am a guest-worker from the other side) are, I feel, pretty skeptical about Green politics. It is strange that this should be so. Thumbing through the old back issues of NI a lot of the subjects that we have touched and causes we have championed are now being taken up by the Greens - from holistic health care to small-scale development projects in the Third World. Maybe we have been Green all along without even recognizing the fact. A UK readership survey confirmed this when 21 per cent claimed Green as their political affiliation. That certainly influenced the decision to do this issue.

One of my fellow editors claims that the Greens are the product of everyone else's failures. Maybe that is what keeps NI going as well. But I hope we challenge some conventional wisdoms and offer a useful tool for understanding the world. We had better or you probably won't renew. So far our record hasn't been too bad or we wouldn't have survived for 14 years. The task the Greens have set for themselves is a lot bigger.

Letters
Letter from Mawere
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by John Medcalf
Reviews:
including the Victorian classic Aurora Leigh
Country profile: Lesotho

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Rick Coffin
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER