The Green movement in America in the 80s and early 90s was like the proverbial elephant and blind man. Depending on how you arrived at it and with whom you practiced it, you could have quite different perceptions of what it was about. Below is a list of the books I believe were most influential in the early stages of US Green activity, before it abandoned many of its non-dualistic ideas and solidfied into a Left-progressive group.
It's an eclectic collection, and I am definitely not saying I agree with everything said in all of them. Far from it. But if you were there, as I was, and you weren't strictly beholden to one ideology, then you might have read any or all of these in the process of understanding this new political groundswell. Note that this is not a definitive list of Third Wave/Green/Radical Middle/whatever reading, but a historic one to capture that moment. I am working on a shorter list of essential reading that also includes more recent stuff.
For some, the entry point was environmentalism. They may have been grassroots activists fighting nuclear power or developers or a toxic waste dump, or simply Sierra Club members who support those causes. Several early self-help thinkers expanded their scope to the whole society, seeing different structures and dysfunctions as social, not just personal, problems. Combined with the emerging New Age movement, this provided a spiritual entry point for the movement. Some feminists, especially those involved in spiritual work, reconsidered the socialistic class struggle dimension of their movement and started playing around with combining female spirituality, environmentalism and other threads to create something called ecofeminism that linked creation in nature with creation in women, and destruction in nature with aggressive, hierarchical and linear thinking in men.
Some early participants, especially in the German political group, were 60s radicals who combined socialist politics with environmentalism and pacifism, linking their enemies -- environmental destruction, exploitation of the disenfranchised, nuclear arms and power, globalism, capitalism and consumerism -- under one umbrella. While they used "neither left nor right" rhetoric, these neosocialists criticized the Left mostly for not being Left enough. In America, when they said you couldn't tell the two parties apart anymore, what they meant was that the Democrats had become less Leftist. Still, though, by the mere fact that they rejected establishment political thinking, they came up with many interesting ideas. (In case you hadn't noticed, they kind of took over the Greens. See my column The Radical Middle #2 for an account of the beginning of this shift.) Deep ecology was a relatively tedious academic movement to relate systems theory with environmentalism and explain how understanding of bioregions and environmental interdependencies demanded a different politics. Tedious but mostly right, and quite influential.
Finally, and saving the best for last in my opinion, was decentralism. In many views, including mine, the whole political line of thought that became Green in America (as opposed to Europe) can be traced back to one book and one person, "Small Is Beautiful" by E.F. Schumacher. Released in 1973, this book asked fundamental questions about the emerging world economy. It asserted, more than anything, that capitalism and globalism were dangerously amoral, and said (to horribly oversimplify) that human-scale structures and technologies - systems at the personal and community level - were nearly always the best solutions and that massive-scale structures and technologies were nearly always dehumanizing and disempowering, and thus harmful to our souls and our society. These harmful massive-scale issues range from oppressive bureaucracies to depersonalizing factory work to global conglomerates to technology that is insensitive to human and local needs. Hazel Henderson, another economist, was writing and lecturing about the idea that GNP was not only inaccurate but also damaging, as it valued productivity and consumption but not quality of life issues like health and education (and in fact in numerous perverse ways valued destruction, as the desctruction wasn't counted off but the rebuilding was counted in.) Many thinkers expanded on the idea of decentralism, including some like Kirkpatrick Sale who leaned towards anarchism, opposing all superstructures like nation states, and others who focused on more day-to-day matters like the sizes of organizations.
Note: For books that are in print, the title links to its detail page at Amazon. For out of print books, to its page at Alibris. Books in regular stock at Amazon also have a Buy from Amazon.com link that adds them directly to your Amazon shopping cart, in case you've already made up your mind you want it. (It shows you the price and asks for confirmation first, and there's a link to the details page too.)
I assume you know, but just to be clear so there's no chance of confusion, I get a small cut when you buy a book through my link. Your price stays the same, it just comes from Amazon's marketing budget since I sent you to them. Every online bookstore has a program like this. I use Amazon because they have great prices (consistently better than you-know-who), great service, and great selection. I use them myself all the time. And what is in print or what Amazon sells has no effect on my list (as you can plainly see.) If a book on my list isn't available, I still listed it, with a link to Alibris, which specializes in used and out-of-print books. If you want to print out my list and take it to a bookstore, please do. My goal here is to share the information, not make a few dollars a month. But if you're going to buy online anyway, following the links here makes it easier and you can know you're helping support this site. Thanks. (I'll be adding descriptions of at least the remianing key books, if not the rest of the list.)
key books
- Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered; 25 years later
by E. F. Schumacher; originally 1973; ISBN 0881791695 - The book that started it all? Well that's too grand, but as Paul Hawken says in the introduction, it was the first popular work to articulate a world view that had been coming together for a while, and it did so in clear, sensible prose that affected a generation of thinkers. This epic work threw down the gauntlet and asked why it is that modern capitalists seem perfectly OK with an amoral system. Bringing together decentralism, appropriate technology, and a moral critique of capitalism, Schumacher makes the case against unrestrained capitalism and globalism, but offering not socialism -- which is merely a variant form -- but something entirely different (a "metaphysical reconstruction") as the solution. He asserts that massive-scale structures and technologies are nearly always dehumanizing and disempowering, and thus harmful to our souls and thus society, and that human-scale structures and technologies - focused at the personal and community level - are nearly always the better solutions. Republished on its 25th anniversary in the age of globalism (1999) with added commentary by current thinkers who were influenced by the work, this book is even more important now. True, it shares a failing with much of the environmental politics of that time - drawing statistical lines based on then-current behavior, it basically declared the end of nature by now, which obviously hasn't happened. And this kind of alarmist rhetoric did far more harm than good. But putting that aside, Small Is Beautiful still offers a needed response to globalism that is different from the neosocialist arguments that dominate the debate (and took over the Greens.)
- The
Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual
Growth
by M. Scott Peck; originally 1983; ISBN 0743243153 - In the midst of the materialistic Me Generation, The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck turned self-help on its head by articulating how spiritual and moral growth relate to therapy, and how dysfunction of the individual relates to the health of the society. He brought self-help concepts to millions of people who hadn't encountered them before. This was a slow word-of-mouth movement, not a marketing phenomenon. Despite silence or open hostility from mainstream media and the psychiatric profession, friends who'd found the book helpful told their friends, and Road Less Traveled hit the Times bestseller list five years after publication, leading the way to the self-help movement and a major piece of the emergence of New Age. Millions of people discovered the concepts of dysfunctional behavior, codependency and enmeshment not in 12-step programs, but from this book, which then had a big influence on the evolution of that movement as well. Technically what Peck deals with is called spiritual psychology but from the start he brought in social and political issues as well and, especially in his later books People Of The Lie and The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, took on social dysfunction directly.
- Human
Scale
by Kirkpatrick Sale 1982 (out of print) - The irony in a book called Human Scale running 558 pages doesn't overshadow the fact that this brilliant thesis makes the argument for radical decentralism, or bioregionalism, better than any other. Sale borders on anarchism but whether you agree with every word or not, his cross-discipline arguments for local control and against centralization and control from afar are accurate and compelling. I had the distinct pleasure of working with him a bit in the early days of the NY Greens; he is a brilliant thinker.
- Creating
Alternative Futures: The End of Economics
by Hazel Henderson; 1978 (out of print) - When
Society Becomes an Addict
by Anne Wilson Schaef; 1988; ISBN 0062548549 - True
and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch; 1991; ISBN 0393307956 - The
Dream of the Earth
by Thomas Berry; 1990; ISBN 0871566222 - Green
Politics
by Charlene Spretnak; 1986 out of print
The full list
Decentralism
by E. F. Schumacher; originally 1973; ISBN 0881791695
by Kirkpatrick Sale; 1982 (out of print)
by Hazel Henderson; 1978 (out of print)
by Kirkpatrick Sale; 1986; ISBN 0820322059
by Frank Bryan and John McClaughry; 1989 out of print
by Wendell Berry; 1987; ISBN 0865472750
by Wendell Berry; 1990; ISBN 0865474370
by Wendell Berry; 1983; ISBN 0865470529
New Age
by Anne Wilson Schaef; 1988; ISBN 0062548549
by M. Scott Peck; originally 1983; ISBN 0743243153
by M. Scott Peck; 1987; ISBN 0684848589
by Mark Satin; 1979 (out of print)
Deep Ecology
by Bill Devall, George Sessions; 1986; ISBN 0879052473
by Thomas Berry; 1990; ISBN 0871566222
Ecofeminism
by Charlene Spretnak; 1986 out of print
by Charlene Spretnak; 1987
by Charlene Spretnak
by Irene Diamond
Communitarianism
by Amitai Etzioni; 1990
Enlightenment liberalism
by Christopher Lasch; 1979; ISBN 0393307387
by E. F. Schumacher; 1978; ISBN 0060906111
by Christopher Lasch; 1991; ISBN 0393307956
Neosocialism
by Barbara Ehrenreich; 1989; 0060973331
Early German Greens
By Petra Kelly; 1985
Rudolf Bahro; 1984 (out of print); ISBN 0860910601
Rudolf Bahro; 1986 (out of print); ISBN 0865710791
© 2004 Philip F. Rose
