The breakthrough electoral victory of the Green Party in the the UK in 1989 was short lived, but emboldened a movement which has created much of the best literature on ecology and social change in the 1990's. Alex Biggs, a veteran of direct action campaigns against nuclear power, sprawl and third world debt, shares his thoughts about strategies for social change in Empowering the Earth.
Biggs' thesis is that "power" is not simply the ability of person A to dominate person B, but it's more about the relationships of people that sustain soceity. Activists need to break the "power over" that lets some people dominate others, but we can't reject power entirely because people need power to get what they want in their lives. Biggs combines ideas from information theory and systems ecology with his decades of experience in the co-operative movement, Earth First! and the UK Green Party. Particularly enjoyable are the vignettes interspersed throughout the text on subjects from nuclear power and affinity groups to local currency and poverty and crime.
Works on political theory run the risk of losing connection with reality, but Empowering the Earth will always be valuable for it's collection of specific stories based on Bigg's broad experience. Greens in Europe have demonstrated that a small fraction (5-10%) of the population can have an effect on lifestyles and public policy far greater than their numbers. Synthesizing political thinkers from Hobbes to Marx to Foucault, Biggs explains why that is, and how a combination of direct action, electoral activism, and alternative institutions such as local currencies and co-operatives can help a seemingly marginal movement succeed against all odds.
Title: Empowering the Earth: Strategies for Social Change
Author: Alex Begg
Publisher: Green Books, Devon, UK
Web site: http://www.greenbooks.co.uk/empower/
ISBN: 1-870098-92-7
Year: 2000
Libraries: Mann
