Implications of industrial collapse for Green politics.

• Author: Eytchison, Patrick
• Position: Thinking Economically

The 21st century will be characterized above all by a global ecological crisis of production. Several interlocking factors of deterioration are involved in this but the primary will be a world depletion of fossil fuels. Inevitably, this will be a period of turmoil and trial, but it can also offer significant opportunities for the Green Movement, but only if the true nature of the crisis is understood. This essay presents a bare-bones outline of the coming crisis, as well as some suggestions for changes in Green strategy' adaptive to the new reality. A brief capitulation of the US Green movement's 18-year past will be a logical bridge to a discussion of what is coming and how we as Greens should proceed.

The period from 1984 to the Gathering of 1991 at Elkins was characterized by attempts to find a political direction. Deep Ecology and Bioregionalism. were cast aside, and the period ended as a standoff between rightwing electoralism and a left/movement faction. From Elkins to Carbondale (1991-2001) found The Greens/Green Party USA (the continuation of the actual Green Movement during those years) following a fairly traditional left activist path. Over a decade, of course, many Party members found this route too steep and attempted to capitulate the Party to the outside electoral faction. In 2001, Carbondale represented a victory over this effort.

The present moment is a key turning point for a party such as the Green Party USA, whose goal is more than a reform of the present system. Insight towards a productive new path, however, will only come through an understanding that the present ecological crisis is at its core a crisis of production, and that this is, in fact, the key issue for politics today and into the future.

Regardless of growing and innumerable social and economic contradictions, the major contradiction of world production today is an irreversible exhaustion of the basic resources needed to support an affluence-directed world system. These fundamental resources include water, soil, minerals, as well as adequate waste disposal reservoirs. Among these, however, predominant is an impending irreversible depletion of economically recoverable petroleum, the essential energy source for modem world production as well as the raw ingredient for many Affluent Age products. Finally, the energy food which has allowed world population to grow from 1 billion to over 6 billion in approximately a century. In this context, there is now a growing consensus that the Earth's original "ultimate recoverable reserve" of oil was between 1,800 and 2,000 billion barrels of oil, and that approximately half of that...