Conscious Choice: Greening of America?

April 1999 | Citizen at Large

Greening of America?

by Jay Walljasper

In 1970, when I was a ninth grader growing up amid the cornfields and soybeans of central Illinois, there was some excited talk around town about a new bestseller titled The Greening of America. There was even discussion about it among us kids, in between reports on who had gotten the braces taken off their teeth and predictions on the prospects of the Urbana high school basketball team. I bought a copy of the book as soon as it appeared in paperback, and devoured it one weekend in a little park not far from my home. It was not a very good book, even I could see that. The author, a Yale University professor named Charles Reich, was so infatuated with the great social changes sweeping the country that he heralded each and every one as a beacon of the great new age that was now dawning. It didn’t matter to him that some of these countercultural currents, say synthetic drugs and natural food, were in complete contradiction of one another. Nor did he seem to notice that some of his own wildly enthusiastic explanations of youth culture trends also contradicted each other. For instance he first celebrated young rebels for wearing bright, vibrantly colored clothes. This showed their zest for life. Then he roared his approval at college students’ preferences for dressing in muted blues, browns, and greens. These "earth tones" reflected their dedication to living a life in harmony with nature. If a 15-year-old could spot the book’s weaknesses, why did it sell so many copies and spark so much discussion? The title explains a lot. Americans, then and now, yearn for a greener home. This means, of course, more trees and parks and gardens. It also means a different way of living —slower, simpler, and more sensible. Eavesdrop on any conversation in a dinner party or barroom from coast-to-coast and you’re likely to hear complaints about not enough time and too much to do mixed in with accounts of their most recent vacation in some relaxing, scenic, charming spot. People are starved for things that their peasant forebears took for granted — close contact with nature and the landscape, time to reflect and relax, kinship with family and neighbors.

As an interpreter of social trends Charles Reich may have been flawed, but he deserves some credit for his skill as a prognosticator. He correctly anticipated that from the great gyrations of the counterculture would come a movement dedicated to the greening of America. While many once-ardent advocates of radical ideas now live in the suburbs and vote Republican, others have held fast to the dream of creating a new kind of American society and they’ve been joined by fresh streams of younger idealists. America’s Green movement is harder to spot than those of European nations, where advocates of a sustainable society proclaim their views from city council chambers and national legislatures. In Germany, the Green Party now shares governing power on the national level with the Social Democratic party. But a national Green Party has not yet gelled in the United States, although statewide parties are forming in a number of states, including Maine, Missouri, Minnesota, New Mexico, Hawaii, and California, where several hundred thousand people signed petitions to get the Greens on the ballot. Still, there are probably fewer than 40 self-proclaimed Greens in elective office in the whole land. The political power structure so far shows little fear of an impending green wave. Politics in America, however, has never been as ideologically straightforward as those in Europe, where diverse parties promote their views under recognizable banners like socialist, conservative, liberal, labour, Christian, and so forth. For us, political change is not brewed at party meetings but rather in the streets and neighborhoods and workplaces and colleges and churches. This is where the Green movement is now gaining strength. Wherever people gather to talk about their lives, you can bet that topics like the environment and community are being discussed. These are the things that directly affect people’s lives. Politicians would prefer to address abstractions like economic growth and the budget deficit while Greens are talking about traffic on the street in front of your house and the toxic waste dump a few miles away.

The real energy in American politics today is not bright young Clintonites, or even the Reform Parties’ brigades of disaffected middle classers, but rather all the grassroots groups that have sprung up to solve problems in their own community. The Citizens Clearinghouse for Toxic Waste lists more than 7,000 local groups around the country fighting pollution in their communities, most of them working in blue collar neighborhoods and rural areas far away from the usual avenues of liberal politics. Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other minorities are amply represented in these organizations, a new development in the until now lily-white politics of environmentalism. A similar movement is sprouting to protect neighborhoods from the mounting devastation of street crime.

In my own neighborhood on the south side of Minneapolis, a proposed expansion of a freeway activated wide segments of the community, including a lot of folks who would not fit your idea of Green activists— senior citizens, real estate agents, civil rights activists, and Catholic and Baptist and Lutheran parishioners, as well as many other everyday people. The woman who spearheaded the drive against the project is now on the city council. I might add that she ran as a Democrat, which is the route that many American Greens will take.

America’s Greens often see more promise in influencing existing institutions like labor unions, religious congregations, business clubs, student organizations, and neighborhoods groups than in creating entirely new political institutions from scratch. That was one problem with the countercultural trailblazers chronicled by Reich. In their attempt to remake the world they failed to reach out to ordinary people. In fact, the average American was often targeted as the prime culprit for ecological crimes.

But who do you think bought all those copies of Greening of America and talked about it in the shops and cafes of my hometown? Not just college students and angry intellectuals. People of all kinds want a greener society for themselves and their children. We need to enlist the hopes of those people into any movement for social and environmental change. That’s the only way to accomplish the greening of America, or any other place.

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