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

Remember the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 90s? McDonalds was a novelty, few had heard of GAP, Starbucks or Top Shop, and things like Nike caused wars in shoe shops. On the political side of things, the country was still run by old men with comb-overs and thick glasses. I remember watching them, as a toddler, during a particularly boisterous session of PMQs which happened to have been left on, slightly bemused when told these men ran the country. The slick pr-managed smile had barely been invented yet. Neither, I think, had environmentalism entered the mainstream. Even the arrival of the messiah, ‘pretty straight guy’ Tony Blair didn’t really do that; his climate change promises tended to be regarded by commentators as electoral garnish. A pleasant, if not particularly filling, addition to New Labour’s juicy promises to rebuild hospitals and get the trains running on time.

Of course there were the occasional middle-class one-family crusaders who did their bit, composting food scraps, cycling the kids to school and recycling their bottles, just as there’s always been those who took it further, downsizing to the Shetlands to grow organic veg. But these people on the whole went against the mainstream, not with it. Next Door was by no means hostile; ‘Nice people’ ‘lovely family’, but nonetheless, slightly eccentric. Harmless enough, mind you, but following a different lifestyle choice to the rest of us. They had to put up with the same kind of warm-hearted ignorance and inadvertent condescension that might greet the first black or gay family to move into a sheltered English village. Although, even in todays enlightened times that’s still the reality in many places, ‘the establishment’ view, arguably, has changed substantially. Today even the party of combovers and thick glasses pays homage to Mother Earth.

In 2007, everyone wants to be green just as ardently as everyone wanted a pair of Nikes back in 1990. If you’re in the public eye, it’s not really a choice, it’s an electoral imperative. Green toilet paper, green cars, green wellies, everything in green, even if it isn’t really, and the marketing men can hardly keep up. It’s never been easier to be green as it is now, while you’re hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t possess at least some form of awareness of climate change. For those who have been at the forefront of this movement, that’s a real victory. With David Cameron wily having picked up on it, and every other political party out there scrambling to outbid them for the green vote, ‘green’, sets the agenda like never before. For fear of being lynched, however, I think it’s high time we questioned whether, having brought the debate this far, being ‘green’ is really where we need to be.

Part II on Friday 13th

As you all probably know,at the core of the EU is economic cooperation between its member countries, which, most of us agree, has on the whole been a pretty good thing. In light of this big, scary globalized super-competitive economy, it certainly makes sense for countries to be bargaining collectively, rather than individually. Because the EU is such a lucrative market for, for example, Chinese textiles or Nigerian cotton, many countries would give their right arm to do a deal to get access to it in a way which they might not if, for example, they were to sign a deal with Wales alone.

The EU is well aware of its strong hand, no more so than when dealing with developing countries, themselves somewhat less enviable position. Woe betide any developing countries which follow our example and band together, of course- in WTO-speak, that’s called price fixing and is strictly prohibited. So all in all, think of EPAs as a bit of a divide-and-rule tactic; they tend to be used as an alternative to more multilateral avenues such as the WTO, where developing countries have had a nasty habit of sticking up for one another in recent years.

And so what do to with all that power? Well, us Europeans have a dirty little secret, the kind of secret which we try to bury below all kinds of sanctimonious language about human rights and democracy, but which is still a bit of an open secret on the world stage. We really like to run other people’s countries. Been doing it for years, centuries even. And so, being Europeans, we simply can’t resist using EPAs as an opportunity to build in all kinds of nifty extra clauses which interfere with the running of the countries we deal with. We can, for example, require the privatization of state owned goods and services (such as water, electricity and even, in some cases education and healthcare), the ending subsidies for certain industries, and and pretty much anything else we’d like to add. A bit like a the highwayman who humiliates you by making you dance in the middle of the road in your undies, just before making off with your handbag.

f the guys in Brussels decide that they’d like everybody in Zambia to wear polka dotted t-shirts on the first Wednesday of every month in return for the right to sell Zambian peanuts within the EU, then who is Zambia to argue? The same principle applies to selling off government owned assets such as the water supply and other public utilities to private (and, funnily enough, often European) ownership.

In the UK, everyone remembers, and some still live with, the kind of upheaval which resulted when British Rail, BT, British Gas etc were all privatised, when certain subsidies and benefits have been changed and when other major changes to the British economy have taken place. Imagine similar changes being demanded of a developing country, and it’s understandable that before committing to some of this stuff, Zambia and others would like the opportunity to work out exactly what the impact of these changes will be.

So how long is Zambia getting to consider the impact of their EPA on their economy? Well, here’s the punch line. They’ve got until next month to sign on the dotted line, or they’ll face penalties which include massive cuts in aid. In other words, they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Damned if they sign up to a trade deal which is so clearly rigged in the EU’s favour, forcing them into major changes to their own economies in which they’ve had no say or time to consider. Damned if they don’t, for the simple reason that if they don’t sign, aid gets cut and they may have lost a rare chance to get badly needed access to foreign markets.

Of course, this is nothing new, tactics have just slightly changed. A few years ago, everybody was pinning their hopes on doing much the same thing through the World Trade Organization, on a multilateral basis. When, thanks partly to bickering between the EU and US, and partly due to pressure from campaigners worldwide, those talks stalled, the EU has therefore been forced to change tack. The new strategy is to make these deals on a bilateral basis, using the clout of the EU to pick off the developing countries one by one.

If this was a gangster movie, you’d at least be impressed by their sheer audacity, resourcefulness and lack of scruples, and after all this, nobody should doubt the EU’s commitment to securing rock-bottom prices for the British consumer. Of course everyone loves scrambling for cheap underpants at Primark, but the question is, at what price?

That may be all fine and well (it isn’t), but the fact remains that under 25s are the fastest growing section of the planet’s population, and more often than not, at the epicentre of most of its problems.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, as HIV wreaks havoc amongst the adult population, it is a new generation, born in the shadow of the disease, who will determine the way forward for the continent. In the export processing zones of Indonesia and Bangladesh, it is the young women of whom the workforce is largely comprised who are leading the struggle for proper rights and working conditions. In Latin America, it is the students who are speaking out against the forced privatisation of their public utilities by foreign multinationals. As climate change and environmental degradation begin to wreak their unfathomable consequences, it again will be the irresponsible ‘yoof’ who have the most to lose, but with the greatest means to find alternatives outcomes.

At first glance, to your proverbial Martian observer, finding these alternatives might not seem so difficult after all. ‘Alternative’ is everywhere! It’s impossible not to walk into Top Shop and buy ‘alternative’ clothing, or to buy anything else but ‘alternative’ music in our chain record stores. Want teenage rebel? It’s this summer’s hot look. Want to be a punk? Their next concert is sponsored by a shoe company and the new album goes on sale next week. Surf bum? Get your ‘vintage’ effect £50 t-shirts from the beach hut in your local shopping centre. Teenage rebellion has, like just about everything else, been sliced, diced, tamed, mass-produced, marketed and packaged, ready for you to buy. Alas, it’s exceedingly difficult to be anything but ‘alternative’ these days.

So whilst the ‘yoof’ are being savaged to sell newspapers here in the West, and in the South, called to the fore of some of the greatest problems of our age, the marketing men are clambering all over themselves to grab a slice of our culture and the right to speak on our behalf. Is a real ‘alternative’ culture and type of consumerism still possible; or in doing that, do we become just another niche market? Stay tuned for the dilemmas, ideas and observations of a student campaigner doing his best to find out.