The Future is Bright Green

Are you feeling bruised and battered enough yet? Whichever way you look at it, 2010 will be remembered by those of us involved in energy and climate change issues as the year environmentalism took one hell of a beating.

As my colleague Hannah Smith has pointed out, it’s the year in which the world of climate campaigning came under pretty intense scrutiny from the media and public opinion, asking pretty searching and –at times uncomfortable- questions.

It’s not that having things thrown at us is anything new- the vested interests, the insiders, and the doubters have been throwing stuff at us for years. But 2010 has been different. The vast majority of people who have criticised us, accused us of lying or –in the bulk of cases- just plain stopped listening, are good people. The chances are at least one of them will be sitting around your Christmas dinner table.
Even more alarmingly for old-school environmentalists, some of the divergent voices are coming from within the movement itself. 2010 has been the year in which a few brave individuals such as Mark Lynas and groups such as the UKYCC have put their heads above the parapet.

These ‘Bright Greens’ and their counterparts such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in the US have challenged the movement to re-think its approach, its methods and to revisit some of our more fundamental assumptions, even revisiting sacred cows such as nuclear power and GM.

Whatever your view on the sacred cows, it’s hard to dismiss the argument that, amid the unprecedented airtime and incremental successes we enjoyed in the years leading up to Copenhagen, we got complacent and became detached from political and cultural reality.

Many of us felt free to retreat into our own worlds cushioned by the moral certainties of middle class idealism and ethical consumerism. We spent too much time preaching and not enough time listening, too much energy posturing and not enough time organising.

There’s nothing like a good knock across the head to clear the cobwebs away and 2010 has provided plenty of them. It would be a disaster for us to ignore or try to shut down the debate that has opened up over the past 6 months- to put our fingers in our ears and to suggest that the thing to do is for us to close ranks, to stick together and to keep on doing what we’re doing, just somehow harder.

Any dynamic movement truly committed to creating change must be open to change itself. It needs to be receptive to new ideas and dissenting voices, to be willing to engage with rather than to simply dismiss critics and challengers. Such debates make us stronger rather than weaker and contribute towards, rather than distract from, our ultimate goals.

Those debates will be difficult- they ask us to be critical friends to one another and to engage with the negative stereotypes of environmentalism rather than pretending they don’t exist.

2010 has given us all a heck of a headache and 2011 must be the year when the Bright Greens take centre stage and inject some much needed radicalism into an increasingly dull green climate movement.

Real radicalism isn’t re-fighting the battles of our parents’ generation, it’s having the courage to publicly challenge old orthodoxies and build something equal to the challenges of the here and now.