I had the pleasure of talking to the bright young girls at South Hampstead High School just last Friday about green politics. They were clearly knowledgeable about the environment as well as about current affairs. The Euro-zone crisis was top on their minds. But I soon realised that there is still a big gap between the idea of the environment being important and seeing it as a political issue.
To them green politics is about an issue that all accept is important and has to be dealt with - but what has it got to do with real politics? That's about real issues like the threat of insolvency to countries, jobs, growth etc. A resident made a related point to me at my surgery - that our talk about the environment is perceived as talking about trees and plants rather than people!
How far from the truth! I should have pointed out that wanting to put the environment to one side and talk about the pressing issues is a bit like wanting to talk about saving your new TV when your house is about to be washed away.
But its clear that we also need to explain better why action is necessary on the environment now and why it is interconnected with everything else. We need to explain why green politics is important not just some work on the environment as an add on.
To many of us it seems obvious. People live within an ecosystem - without it we cannot survive. For the 6bn people ( and expected to be 9bn by 2050) on a planet that is already exploited to its full, which suffers from water scarcity, fuel scarcity and real threats to food security to avoid conflict or famine or both we need to live very differently. Otherwise our fragile ecosystems will collapse.
And there is a way that does allow us to bring things into balance but it is one that challenges consumerism and the idea that owning more and more is the ultimate aim of human existence. It has a different perspective of human beings - as creative and social beings that achieve real well-being through friendship, family, community and creativity.
It places a high premium on a fair distribution of resources so that we don't need enormous amounts of growth so that just a little trickles down to the very poorest. It also places a high premium on respecting the world we live in and depend upon.
This means changing things so improve our democratic structures to challenge the power of the big corporations which are unable to look at the world through a different lens. It involves people coming together to say they want a different approach.
It means managing our economy so that we can ensure high enough levels of employment but without making the economy all about growth driven by advertising and a manic need to buy more and keep up with the neighbours. It means addressing a financial services sector that seeks higher and higher returns without an interest in the longer term, and ensuring that banks aren't so big that we have no choice other than to prop them up and we need a fairer system nationally and internationally. That's essential if we aren't going to be on a constant search for growth.
Thats' not to say that growth isn't needed for Africa - it is - nor that we don't need it now in the UK. We do need it to get out of recession.
So still more work to show why we need green politics and a green perspective not just an environmental policy as an adjunct to business as usual (or at least seeking to save business as usual).
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