Back in the 90s when, as a teenager, I was first getting into green politics, it was often said that green would transcend the ‘grey’ politics of left and right. You don’t hear that much any more. Maybe we should. Is right-wing environmentalism part of the answer to the multiple ecological crises the world faces? Can we meaningfully create a consensus outside our socio-economic political differences and find ways to work together?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because of a discussion on the topic I was part of. I will boil the conversation down to its two main arguments. The proposition, as it were, is that we exist in a bubble of other like-minded, progressive, evidence-led people while, in the wider world, people are falling for dishonest and divisive far-right rhetoric. It is as if we live in separate universes with entirely different understandings of reality. The counterargument is to acknowledge that people on the right also care about the environment – some of them, at least – and start to build a consensus that transcends the old left-right binary. You can have right-wing and left-wing environmental politics. Rightwing environmentalism might look like Tories caring about the countryside, for example, or eco-fascism, or a belief that capitalism will come up with a green technofix.
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Paul Burgess 