More Greentexts

Reading Breakthrough led me to another recent (2007) book, Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming, in which N&S have a chapter ("Irrationality Wants to Be your Friend"). It's the record of a conference at Middlebury a few years back, and has some pretty interesting contributions from a range of figures. Among the most helpful is a chapter on "Shaping the Movement" by Mary Lou Finley, which includes a typology of the different roles that you can play in social movements--Citizen, Rebel, Social Change Agent, Reformer--depending on temperament and location within the power structure.

Recommended Reading

"Politics is more like wrestling than solo clarinet. ... One wrestler moves, the other responds. Repeat as necessary. In the political ecosystem, responses are continual. No important move evades response. "

Bill Chaloupka has a great pocket history of green politics in the US in a new collection called Ignition: What You Can Do To Stop Global Warming. (It's the product of a Middlebury conference, and has a preface from Bill McKibben).

He has a great discussion of the difference between insider and outsider politics--the former partial, opportunistic and compromised, the latter (protest) satisfying as "ritualized moralism." Both are necessary--inevitable, in fact--but, he argues, American greens have preferred moralistic protest. His counsel: politics needs to be about storytelling, greens should give up the idea of "nature" as a final solution, a once-and-for-all ground to arguments. Politics will always be inconclusive.