Is ‘greenness’ simply a lifestyle choice? A lot of us, this blog’s readership included, might be perfectly comfortable with that assertion. Thanks to events over the past decade or so, the ‘green’ lifestyle has become an option for the West’s middle classes, but it is by no means the only one. The suburban ideal, like just about everything else, now comes in a variety of flavours. When Blairites capitalised on this in 1997, the phenomenon ceased to be a consumer trend, stepping into the public sector, and becoming an all-pervasive theme of our era. The citizen, they argue, is now also a customer, and should be free to chose a school for their children as freely as they would chose a pair of shoes.

Where once the middle class strove to keep up with the Joneses, we’d now much rather prove our worth by asserting our individualism. The high street, at one time the peddler of a kind of homogenous, identikit fashion for the masses, is now all about finding a new look for ourselves, defining ourselves and marking out who we wish to be, by what we buy. Neurotic middle-aged control-freaks with no sense of humour buy PCs, whilst savvy, young, laid-back creative types use Macs, remember?

And so we’ve been pigeonholed accordingly. Are you a ‘Metrosexual’, ‘BME’, ‘Yuppie’, ‘NEET’, ‘Chav’, ‘Punk’, ‘Hippie’, ‘Emo’, ’Goth’ or one of the others? In the old days, a ‘Green’ was someone who typically recycled their bottles, had a compost heap or womery, didn’t own a car, avoided flying, wore knitted woollen jumpers and bought suspect looking organic veg from a tin shed on the outskirts of town. Often they were vegetarians too, and in their younger days had been caught up in things like the CND or Greenpeace, more often than not still receiving their monthly newsletter in the post. In the day of the ‘New’ Green, on the other hand, anyone can do it. You just have to drive the right car, have the right energy supplier, switch your 60” flat screen off at night and ensure the holiday home in Tuscany has been fitted with solar panels.

Of course, very often such people don’t exist beyond the pages of marketing manuals or the studies of sociologists or demographers, and few would doubt that being some shade of ‘green’, New or Old, is better than no green at all. Equally so, a lot has been said and written about the Old Greens and their uncertain relationship to the vastly more numerous New Greens as it is they, rather than the Old, who now set the environmentalist agenda. That’s a debate for elsewhere, and indeed, this article is a broader analysis of the current state of the environmentalist movement, just as applicable to both as we approach what may prove to be some of the most critical decades of modern history.

The first bitter pill for both to swallow is that if ‘green’ is regarded a little more than a lifestyle choice, we’re toast. It’s easy, having put our own houses in order, to enter into a guilt-free comfort zone. We’re doing our bit, and exhort others to do the same. For the New Greens, many of whom now dominate Britain’s establishment, the environmental lifestyle is in danger of being a political carrot; the kind of lifestyle the pollsters know middle England aspires to, and thus the one the politicians promise to deliver by way of symbol, speech and gesture.

For the ‘Old’, environmentalist hardcore, the situation is slightly different. Whilst their issue now tops the political agenda, the majority hold out against the political mainstream, for fear of being co-opted into a social and economic agenda of which they (perhaps rightly) want no part. Instead, many judge their time better spent as part of local and national interest groups and NGOs, or within smaller, more radical political parties. Some even chose to disengage altogether, sectioning themselves off onto the smallholding, content in the knowledge that they’re doing all they can to insure themselves and their family against the apocalypse they know is coming.

Continued on Monday 16/7/07