Greening the Future: Editor's Note
There was a time when anyone with a pronounced green conscience was typecast as a misplaced idealist or an instinctive alarmist, an inconvenient intruder into the lofty frames of progress. We are at a phase in our evolution as a responsive society where we can afford some idealism in our engagement with the planet, whether it is at an individual or an institutional level. Terms such as planetary health, climate morality, carbon footprint, and ecological imbalance are no longer at odds with our agenda for a better future. They reflect our attitude towards an endangered inheritance. When a president chants drill-baby-drill, it doesn’t sound funny. It sounds insensitive. And sensitivity is the word that captures the mandatory trait of anyone with a stake in the planet.
This must be a shared trait, bringing the green quotient of governance into perfect harmony with the behavioural shift of civil society. A manifesto for change cannot exclude the cries of a planet endangered by the bad behaviour of humanity. And politics that mocks eco morality won’t help us in making alternatives a serious mission either. Take this. We didn’t exactly experience a second oil shock as the war in the Middle East peaked, but we were inching towards an energy apocalypse before a creaky ceasefire came into force. The oil supremacy in powering growth was under attack, and we all felt the pain so acutely because there were few governments that showed the urgency for alternative forms of energy. Isn’t it time for the applied economics of sustainability?
Not just in wartime, an overstressed planet manifests itself in a million ways every day. We notice some; we remain indifferent to most. As featured elsewhere in the following pages, there are active eco-romantics amidst us, making a redeeming difference to the life of earth. They are necessary proselytisers who hold a lamp for us, reminding us that only we, after inflicting such cruelties on the planet, can ensure its wellbeing. Thankfully, eco-cynicism is giving way to eco-empathy, the growing popularity of electric vehicles being one happy example, as reported in this issue.
Still, an environmentalist is not someone specialising in eco-arcana, far removed from the everyday expediencies of ordinary people, any longer. Today we are all environmentalists, and that is not just to show our gratitude and indebtedness to a planet pleading for kindness. It is to show who we are at a time when politics is increasingly at home with the ideas of hatred and exclusion, and the two wars, one partly concluded in Iran and the other still raging in Ukraine, have shown that with bloody clarity. In the invisible other war, we are testing the resistance of Planet Earth. We can win this one only if we let earth not lose it.
That said, most causes radicalise themselves when they become an ism. That is when good causes get lost in ideological certainties. Isms, even environmentalism at its extreme, fall into dogma and righteousness. The so-called green parties in countries like the UK are a study in how lofty nomenclature hides populist posturing. An environmental position is not a rejection of the moral pragmatism of democracies. What we need in abundance is ecological compassion, not ecological absolutism.
Which means: Being human. To remain one in its true sense, we need to listen to the sighs and sorrows of the planet. That is what we do in the following pages, where informed arguments for a renewed green consciousness will, hopefully, add an immediacy of ideas and attitude to the national conversation on the future.