Influence on the U.S. Environmental Movement

Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 61, Number 3, 2015, pp.414-431. Exemplars and Influences: Transnational Flows in the Environmental Movement CHRISTOPHER ROOTES Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK Transnational flows of ideas are examined through consideration of Green parties, Friends of the Earth, and Earth First!, which represent, respectively, the highly institutionalised, the semi- institutionalised and the resolutely non-institutionalised dimensions of environmental activism. The focus is upon English-speaking countries: US, UK and Australia. Particular attention is paid to Australian cases, both as transmitters and recipients of examples. The influence of Australian examples on Europeans has been overstated in the case of Green parties, was negligible in the case of Friends of the Earth, but surprisingly considerable in the case of Earth First!. Non-violent direct action in Australian rainforests influenced Earth First! in both the US and UK. In each case, the flow of influence was mediated by individuals, and outcomes were shaped by the contexts of the recipients. Introduction Ideas travel. But they do not always travel in straight lines. The people who are their bearers are rarely single-minded; rather, they carry and sometimes transmit all sorts of other ideas that are in varying ways and to varying degrees discrepant one with another. Because the people who carry and transmit them are in different ways connected to various, sometimes overlapping, sometimes discrete social networks, ideas are not only transmitted in variants of their pure, original form, but they become, in these diverse transmuted forms, instantiated in social practices that are embedded in differing institutional contexts. These institutional contexts are themselves the cumulative products of past practice, influenced by other ideas from other times and contexts. Shaped by and shaping relationships of power and influence, institutions facilitate or constrain the reception of new ideas and at least partly determine the elements of those ideas that resonate with actors in a particular institutional milieu and that appear capable of informing effective action. Thus ideas travel, but they do not travel under conditions of their creator’s choosing, and the destinations at which they arrive differ in all kinds of unsuspected ways, with the result that when ideas inspire action in particular places, that action is apt to vary considerably from one location to another. So it is with ideas about environmental action. Ideas about action to address environmental ills have travelled from one country to another, and have inspired forms of action and organisation that, despite their often adopting the same names, vary substantially in ways that reflect the peculiarities of their destinations. My discussion of these cases is not symmetrical, because I am especially interested in the role of the Australian instances, both as recipient of ideas originating elsewhere, and as transmitter of ideas to other countries. © 2015 The Author. Australian Journal of Politics and History © 2015 School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd. Exemplars and Influences 415 I consider three different forms of environmental action: one that quickly became formally institutionalised; one that became relatively institutionalised in only one of the countries considered; and one that deliberately resisted even minimal institutionalisation. I briefly consider the case of Green parties, which, because they seek to become players in institutionalised politics, necessarily become relatively institutionalised to the extent that they are successful. Green parties are also interesting because their experience upsets simple assertions about the diffusion of ideas and strategies, and because it clearly shows the impacts of receiving contexts upon outcomes. My focus, however, is principally upon one less institutionalised environmental organization — Friends of the Earth — and one — Earth First! — that deliberately avoided and successfully escaped institutionalisation. I am especially concerned with these manifestations of environmentalism in the US, UK and Australia. The flow of ideas and people between the countries of the English- speaking world is relatively easy and influences and interactions are consequently frequent. Yet, at least in respect of environmental activism and green politics, they tend to have been remarked only in passing. Because organisational labels travel easily, it is often assumed that activities similarly labelled in two or more countries are empirically similar, when in fact they are almost always significantly different. I will attempt to trace transnational influences and the sources of differences among the various national cases, including the forms of environmental activism and the issues on which it has focussed, ideas and practices that have been diffused by various means, including direct personal contacts and correspondence, mass media and new media of communication. Green Parties The development of Green parties has sometimes been claimed as an instance of a flow, not from the core to the periphery, but in the opposite direction, from the periphery to the core. It is widely accepted that the first green party on the planet was formed in Australia in 1972: the United Tasmania Group (UTG). Although it formed to contest the Tasmanian government’s destruction of wilderness in the pursuit of economic development, it did not call itself “green”; the name “Green Independents” was adopted in 1991, and “Tasmanian Greens” in 1992. The UTG originated in protest against the planned flooding of Lake Pedder as part of a hydro-generation scheme, but it was not simply a single issue party; its “New Ethic”, “based on the four pillars of Ecology, Social Justice, Participatory Democracy and Peace, became the cornerstone of green politics thereafter”.1 It has sometimes been claimed, usually by Australians, that it was developments in Australia that exported the “green” label to environmental politics in Europe.2 In particular, it has been claimed that the German activist Petra Kelly was inspired, after her 1977 visit to Australia, by the Green Bans imposed by the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) in Sydney to campaign for the formation of a Green party in Germany.3 Perhaps what most impressed Kelly was the spectacle of 1 Christine Milne, “Green Politics”, The Companion to Tasmanian History, 2006 <http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/G/Green%20Politics.htm>, accessed online 14 April 2015. See also Bob Brown and Peter Singer, The Greens (Melbourne, 1996), pp.68-70. 2 Senator Bob Brown claimed this in his maiden speech, 21 March 1997. See also Meredith Burgmann and Verity Burgmann, Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation (Sydney, 1998), pp.9-10. 3 See contributions by Chris McConville and Astrid Kirchhof in this volume. 416 Christopher Rootes working men campaigning for environmental protection in practical and effective ways, in response to calls for protection from local communities confronted with threats to their environment, but it is improbable that that could have inspired the formation in Germany of a new party or, indeed, the decision to label it “green”. After all, there were plenty of other factors driving in that direction in the ferment of German extra-parliamentary politics in those years. From the early 1970s, “citizens’ initiatives” (Bürgerinitiaven) proliferated across Germany, and in 1972 a Federal Alliance of Citizens’ Initiatives for Environmental Protection (Bundesverband Bürgerinitiaven Umweltschutz (BBU)) was founded, and quickly embraced hundreds of local groups.4 Conflicts within local Citizens’ Initiatives drove conservative environmental activists in Lower Saxony to form Green Lists for Environmental Protection (Grüne Liste Umweltschutz), which contested local elections and first successfully entered the political arena at community level in 1977.5 Green Lists contested state elections from 1978, and first entered a state legislature (in Bremen) in 1979.6 These developments predate the use of the label Die Grünen in the 1979 elections for the European Parliament, and the formation of the national political party in 1980. Well into the 1980s both conservative and radical left environmentalist factions employed the label “Green”.7 The rapid rise of the German Greens and, especially, their success in winning seats in the federal parliament in 1983, inspired others. Yet the spread of Green parties was by no means a simple case of diffusion of ideas from the German exemplar. Environmentalism and/or ecologism had already made its entrance onto the political stage long before the formation of Die Grünen: in England in 1973, when environmentalists, including the founder-editor of The Ecologist magazine, Edward Goldsmith, formed a party called “People”, which became the Ecology Party in 1975 and the Green Party in 1987;8 and in France, where the ecologist, René Dumont, stood for the presidency in 1974, and local “ecological” groups and micro-parties campaigned in local and national elections, culminating in the formation in 1981 of Les Verts — parti écologiste (The Greens — ecologist party) out of the Mouvement

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