Social Ecology and Social Movements
From the 1960s to the Present

By Brian Tokar

Pages | 1 2 3

print this article

Left Greens and Youth Greens

During that grassroots program-building process, an increasing tension emerged between Greens committed to grassroots democracy and municipalist politics, and those aiming toward a Green Party that could field candidates for national office. Social ecologists in New England circulated a call for a Left Green Network in 1988, and like-minded activists in the San Francisco Bay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. The Left Greens held their first national caucus meetings during the Greens’ national conference in Eugene, Oregon in June of 1989, with a very large proportion of conference attendees participating.

While some in the Greens viewed the Left Greens in grimly conspiratorial terms, it turned out that Left Green positions were widely popular with grassroots Greens all across the country, and significantly influenced the shaping of the Green Program. The following year’s Greens gathering was held in an elite resort town in the Rocky Mountains, and there were far too few Left Greens in attendance to even hold caucus meetings. Still, most of the platform positions argued for by the Left Greens became incorporated in the final program document. This, apparently, was the occasion when several influential moderate Greens decided that they would have to eventually secede from the existing Green organization to create a more traditional national party. Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassroots activists also began losing interest in the Greens at this point. Green moderates went on to form a separate national organization, based exclusively on state-certified Green Parties, while the Left Green Network continued holding educational conferences and publishing materials largely independent of any other Green entity.

During the same period, a group of recent ISE students formed a youth caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens debated positions on a wide array of issues, refined their positions on both external and internal matters, and attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside the Greens. However it was at the Eugene Greens gathering that Youth Greens and Left Greens united around the idea of a major direct action to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day during April of 1990. While mainstream Earth Day celebrations were taking on an increasingly compromised character—essentially casting the search for environmental solutions as an expression of individual lifestyles and consumer choices—the Youth Greens, Left Greens, and a wide array of grassroots supporters, chose to focus on the symbolic home of capitalist ecocide: Wall Street.

April 22, 1990—Earth Day Sunday—was a day of polite, feel-good commemorations with strikingly little social or political content; many big city events were almost wholly sponsored by major corporations. But early Monday morning, several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged on the nerve center of U.S. capitalism seeking to obstruct the opening of trading on that day. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a wide range of social ecological writings, and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News:

Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded. It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.

Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, social ecologists formed the Burlington Greens to develop positions on urban issues and run candidates for local office. The Greens opposed the commercial development of the city’s Lake Champlain waterfront, and argued that the neighborhood assemblies established by the Progressive city administration for planning and administrative purposes should become the basis for a more empowered model of democratic neighborhood governance. The Burlington Greens gained national headlines in 1989 when the Greens contested several City Council seats and a Green candidate challenged the city’s Progressive mayor in a citywide election.

Confronting Biotechnology

The ISE also became actively involved in issues around biotechnology during the late 1980s, as farmers and environmentalists in Vermont and elsewhere were becoming concerned that the impending release of a genetically engineered growth hormone for dairy cows would have a devastating impact on Vermont’s small farm economy. A Vermont Biotechnology Working Group, including activists from the ISE, Rural Vermont, the Progressive Party and the Burlington Greens, helped raise public awareness about recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), and published the first widely accessible activist handbook on biotechnology. The Vermont effort played a significant role in delaying the approval for the commercial use of Monsanto’s rBGH by several years. Social ecologists were also involved in protesting a planned new biotechnology building at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and supporting activists in New York City who were opposing a planned biotechnology complex on the site of the Audubon Ballroom, the famous Harlem cultural center where Malcolm X was assassinated following a speech in 1965.

By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the impending release of a wide variety of genetically engineered food products was going to have profound implications for public health, the environment, and society at large. Sonja Schmitz had recently come to study at the ISE after leaving a position at DuPont’s biotechnology laboratories, faculty member Chaia Heller became involved in the early ecofeminist opposition to biotechnology, and Brian Tokar was advising M.A. student Zoë Erwin on a biotechnology-centered Masters study, while considering appropriate next steps following the Vermont rBGH campaign. The four began doing presentations together at the ISE, as well as at venues in New York, Montreal and other cities. They participated in the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation in St. Louis in 1998, launched a regional activist network, NorthEast Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (NERAGE) and began developing plans for a comprehensive published collection on biotechnology issues, which eventually appeared as Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books, 2001).

In the spring of 2000, the ISE Biotechnology Project was the initiator and the main organizational sponsor of Biodevastation 2000, which became the largest public gathering in opposition to biotechnology in North America to date. Some 4,000 people converged in Boston’s Copley Square, and marched on the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO); this protest followed a three-day public teach-in that highlighted a wide array of issues related to both the genetic engineering of food, and the implications of biotechnology for health care, medical research, globalization, and the survival of indigenous cultures around the world. Since 2000, the Biotechnology Project has provided significant support for Biodevastation and Biojustice events in San Diego and Toronto, and is helping develop plans for major events in St. Louis and Washington, D.C. during 2003.

In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops at their annual Town Meetings. Eight towns took the further step of discouraging or declaring a moratorium on the planting of GE crops in their town. This was the first round of the Town-to-Town campaign, in which the ISE’s Biotechnology Project has played a central educational and organizational role, in collaboration with the farm advocacy group Rural Vermont and the Vermont Genetic Engineering Action Network. In a followup effort in March of 2003, an additional 37 towns voted against GE food and crops. Vermont now has the distinction of having 70 municipalities that have voted against GE food and crops out of more than 85 in the entire U.S. Our coalition partners are now focusing on passing anti-GE legislation in Vermont, while we are working to sustain the grassroots focus of a growing GE-Free Vermont campaign.

The work of the ISE Biotechnology Project today reflects a distinct political outlook on grassroots organizing, an approach that is firmly grounded in the principles of decentralism, community control, and face-to-face democracy. This work has encouraged biotechnology activists to consider the widest social and political implications of these issues, and helped those confronting the institutions of global capitalism to understand how globalization directly impacts our food and our health. The Biotechnology Project seeks to address the widest possible implications of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies and solidify links between biotech activists and those working primarily on global justice issues. Similarly, ongoing workshops and courses on biotechnology issues at the ISE reflect social ecology’s holistic and dialectical understandings of society, nature, politics and technology. (For details, see, “Biotechnology: Radicalizing the Debate,” in Harbinger, Vol. 2, No. 1).

Movement for Global Justice

Finally, the ISE has played a central educational role in the current movement for global justice and to counter the institutions of capitalist globalism. Social ecologists have raised discussions around the potential for direct democracy as an alternative to increasingly centralized economic and political institutions, and helped further the evolution of what began as largely a protest movement to one that is unusually conscious of the need for a long-range reconstructive vision. During the summer of 1999, ISE students intervened in an official hearing in Burlington, Vermont that addressed US agricultural policy in anticipation of the Seattle WTO meetings. Three ISE students were centrally involved in the organizing for the WTO shutdown in Seattle, and several others formed an affinity group to participate in and document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE pamphlet Bringing Democracy Home highlighted the writings of social ecologists on potential future directions for the movement, and various faculty members have highlighted these themes in their speaking tours. Many antiglobalization activists from across the country have come to the ISE in Vermont during the past few summers to further their own political analysis and participate in discussions of where the movement might be heading. We look forward to ongoing exchanges of ideas, theories and inspirations as this dynamic new movement continues to evolve over the coming years.

Notes

Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” in Post Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), p. 80.