US Green movement
In May 1984, at the first North American Bioregional Congress, activists met and formed a "Green Movement Committee" to form an ecological movement based on the German Greens. The working group planned a conference in St. Paul that summer and adopted Ten Key Values: Ecological Wisdom, Grassroots Democracy, Personal and Social Responsibility, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Community-Based Economics, Postpatriarchal (feminist) Values, Respect for Diversity, Global Responsibility, and Future Focus. The group defined the new organization as federation of local alliances, rather than a national political party. They called themselves the Committees of Correspondence after the committees in the American Revolution. Members left the St. Paul convention and and spread the word across the country.[1]
In 1985, a local Green Party formed in New Haven, Connecticut and ran candidates for City Council. They came in second to the Democrats, beating the Republicans. Months after the election, a City Council member joined the Greens, becoming the first Green elected official in the country.[2]
The Greens held their first national conference in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1988, Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists circulated a call for a Left Green Network, a network which wound up calling themselves social ecologists and advocating the abolition of capitalism and the state. To the displeasure of the movement's more moderate elements, the Left Greens introduced and passed a variety of radical proposals into the Greens' platform at a 1990 convention in Colorado: opposition to commodifying the air, support for indigenous sovereignty, a three-quarters reduction in the military budget, and more. By 1990, there were 150 active Green locals and 200 other affiliated groups.[3]
A Youth Greens caucus, formed around this time by recent Institute for Social Ecology students, also embraced an anarchist position. The Youth Greens and Left Greens partnered to organize a march on Wall Street on Earth Day of 1990.
On the day following the official commemorations--a Sunday filled with polite, heavily corporate sponsored events--several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists, environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged on Wall Street seeking to obstruct the opening of stock trading on that day.[4]
By 1990, there were over 150 active Green locals and 200 other affiliated groups. Around this time, however, the movement began to split into two factions: a reformist, electoral strand and a radical, participatory strand. Exemplary of the reformist strand, in 1989 some national-level activists formed an independent Green Party Organizing Committee, which eventually became the famous U.S. Green Party that ran Ralph Nader for president several times. The radical strand formed a national organization called The Greens/Green Party USA in 1991. By the mid-1990s, electoral politics had become the Greens movement's de facto focus, and for the most part the Left Greens and Youth Greens difted away to other projects.[5]
- ↑ Brian Tokar, The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (San Pedro: R. & E. Miles, 1992), 52-53.
- ↑ Tokar, The Green Alternative, 149.
- ↑ Tokar, The Green Alternative 51-53. Tokar, "On Bookchin’s Social Ecology and its Contributions to Social Movements", Capitalism Nature Socialism (2008), http://www.skidmore.edu/~rscarce/Soc-Th-Env/Env%20Theory%20PDFs/Tokar--Bookchin.pdf. Tokar, "The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts", Institute for Social Ecology, http://www.social-ecology.org/2006/01/the-greens-as-a-social-movement-values-and-conflicts/. Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl, "A Critique of the Draft Platform of the Left Green Network," Institute for Social Ecology, http://www.social-ecology.org/1991/06/left-green-perspectives-23/.
- ↑ Tokar, "On Bookchin's Social Ecology and its Contributions to Social Movements." Tokar, "The Greens as a Social Movement."
- ↑ Tokar, The Green Alternative, 53-54. Tokar, "The Greens as a Social Movement." The Greens/Green Party USA, "Why are there two Green Parties?" https://www.greenparty.org/why.php.
