Green Politics
Rule, James B.
With this issue, Dissent inaugurates a new concern with the politics of the environment. The following essays have been specially commissioned to broach this theme, as have additional ones that...
...We do not aim, in these or subsequent articles, at any sort of "party line...
...Starting from such views, it requires a bit of reconsideration to acknowledge that the most momentous developments in coming decades could well stem from the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman environment...
...To do these things, we need to conceive new directions and possibilities for political and environmental action—new alliances, new tactics, new interpretations of interest...
...Robert Proctor's essay on cancer surveys the struggles to comprehend, and to allocate responsibility for, what has been regarded as the ultimate symptom of human tampering with the environment...
...We want to identify approaches to environmental action that direct its benefits at least as much to the least privileged as to those on top...
...The environment is not a standard theme for the political left...
...The following articles confront the politics of the environment from quite different directions...
...On the contrary, our work is to explore how they may be reconciled...
...Sometimes programs of environmental protection fly in the face of populist sentiments...
...To be sure, political struggle and environmental action are hardly exclusive...
...But the concerns of the democratic left do not always "map" onto those of environmental activism in any easy or automatic way...
...We have no master plan for where these discussions must lead, but we take pleasure in opening them here...
...Thereafter, we expect to carry articles on these topics regularly...
...We want to build a case that concern for the long-term quality and sustainability of life on the planet fits well with democratic and egalitarian politics...
...Ruth Rosen analyzes the unequal exposure of the most vulnerable Americans to environmental harm—and thus reminds us that environmental politics are never far removed from the grittier realities of social stratification...
...In its classic thinking, the left has most often viewed the future of humanity as turning on outcomes of essentially political struggles—capital versus labor, for example, or democracy versus authoritarianism, or egalitarianism versus hierarchy...
...The following essays have been specially commissioned to broach this theme, as have additional ones that will appear in the Summer issue...
...Sometimes the concerns of environmentalists are cast as elite tastes indulged at the expense of the broad public...
...And the two articles on the German Green party—one by David Kramer, the other by Christian Joppke and Andrei Markovits—take a hard, critical look at the most successful, if sometimes quixotic, venture of environmental activists into instutitional politics...
...We do not believe that these antinomies are absolute or unresolvable...
...And the left shares some basic assumptions with the environmental movement—the revulsion at leaving important resource allocations to the tender mercies of private capital, for example, or the insistence on creating a voice for interests not represented in existing political processes...
...We expect that the views and proposals you will find here will be as diverse and contentious as on other topics covered in Dissent...
...214 • DISSENT SPRING • 1994 • 213...
...Sometimes needs for jobs appear to run a collision course with interests in protecting a species, a place, or a resource...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
