Abstract
Environmental exploitation has always been an integral aspect of human activities in the world, a natural part as it were of peoples’ way of life. However, the radical transformations in demographic, geographical and socioeconomical patterns, maturing in the late nineteenth century, led the Western industrial Empires to heavily rely on global natural resources for their rapid growth. World resources were gradually incorporated into one central pool of capital, managed largely through international markets’ mechanisms, resulting in a rapid depletion of resources on a worldwide scale. It took the recovery from two world wars for relatively affluent and stable advanced industrial democracies to settle in under the bipolarity of the cold war, a balance of power that set in motion environmental problems, paving their way onto the political agenda.
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Notes
For different accounts of Environmental political theory, see R. E. Goodin, Green Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1992);
A. Dobson, Green Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1990);
R. Eckersely, Environmentalism and Political Theory (New York: UCL, 1989) and
D. Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1984).
D. Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: John Wiley, 1976), p. 9.
G. Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, vol. 162, 1968, 1243–8.
A. Hurrel and B. Kingsbury (eds), The International Politics of the Environment (1992).
G. Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (New Jersey: Chatham, 1987), p. 88.
A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 204–5. Thus incorporating Goodin’s idea into this belief.
See the discussion in T. Pogntke, Alternative Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993)
and in The Greens in West Germany ed. E. Kolinsky, (Oxford: Berg, 1989).
A distinction should be made between where did the new social activists came from politically — where the disdain from established politics is much more important than whether they were disappointed with the Left or the Right parties, and between where, along this continuum, they have ended up. Most Green Parties, for example, are largely on the centre-Left of this axis, but for this is at the end of a political process with the beginning of which — a time when neither Left nor Right would do — we are analysing. For an account portraying the Greens as an integral part of the Left, see A. Markovits and P. Gorski, The German Left (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
C. Tilly, forthcoming cited in Sidney Tarrow, ‘The Europeanisation of conflict: Reflection from a social movement perspective’ in West European Politics, vol. 18, 1995, p. 228.
Vast literature, written both by activists and analysts, manifest this duality of fear and hope, despair that generates political action. For example see Petra Kelly, Fighting for Hope (London: Hogarth Press, 1984);
P. Kelly and J. Leinan Prinzip Leben: Ökopax (Berlin: Verlag Olle, 1982). For an analysis see Markovits and Gorski, The German Left, esp. pp. 125–41.
G. Mosse, The Crisis of the German Ideology (The Universal Library, New York, 1964), p. 4.
For an overview of Right wing concepts of nature in politics see Anna Barmwell, Ecology in the 20th Century (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
See the discussion of Raschke on the lack on positive content of the concept of the environment, in J. Raschke, Die Grünen: Wie sie wurden, was sie sind (Koln: Bund Verlag, 1993) pp. 69–74.
See R. Inglehart, ‘Values, ideology, and cognitive mobilisation in new social movements’ in Challenging the Political Order eds R. Dalton and M. Keuchler (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 43–66 and other chapters of this volume.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Talshir, G. (1997). ‘Limits to Growth’ and the Limits of Democracy. In: Shain, Y., Klieman, A. (eds) Democracy: The Challenges Ahead. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25776-8_12
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