Editor’s note: The following article by Jonathon Porritt was previously published in One Earth Magazine Issue No. 21, Spring 1996

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Jonathon Porritt has been an influential environmental campaigner in the UK and worldwide for more than 20 years; as director of Friends of the Earth until 1990, as a journalist, broadcaster and policy advisor. He is the co-founder of Forum for the Future, a partnership of independent experts committed to building a sustainable way of life. Here is an edited transcript of the talk he gave, which rounded off the formal presentations at the Eco-village conference [1995]. His starting point is to look at the communitarian movement and its five central tenets and then he looks at what he calls ‘eco-communitarianism’ and what this new approach is adding to conventional communitarian thinking.

The first tenet relates to scale. At long last it seems the concept of human scale has actually emerged as a serious piece of political, sociological understanding in today’s existing system. What are eco-communitarians adding to that? Well, we’re adding two things. First we’re adding the notion of appropriateness of scale: a human scale which is geared appropriately to the different contexts in which human beings are living and working —not just the number of human beings, but the degree to which those human beings are dependent on the surrounding environment, the resources that we need. Secondly, we can add a bit of precision about the way in which the word ‘community’ is used, because we get a lot of abuses of the word ‘community’ today, like the business community, a community of nations, virtual community. Call them what you like—associations, networks, assemblies, it doesn’t much matter—but don’t call them communities, they are not communities. For a community to be a community, it has to be embedded in a place, in a hard edged, physical, tangible, smellable, feelable place. That is the essence of what the ecologists bring to the debate about community—that it is rooted, that it is embedded, ecologically and culturally.

The second thing about communitarianism today is, and this is particularly true of the work of its best-known exponent, Amitai Etzione, is the desire to put the balance right between rights and responsibilities. Big issue in America. The thesis runs that the attribution of rights has gone too far. We have not allowed for a proper balancing or weighting of responsibilities to match those rights. So everybody expects, for instance, to be tried by a jury but nobody will ever be prepared to serve on a jury. We expect politicians to sort out everything, but we can’t even be bothered to vote for them. Benefits should be available on tap, but we are not necessarily prepared to work for them and if any socially progressive, liberally minded person talks about anything that even vaguely resembles workfare they are instantly considered to be living in a very dangerous political zone. We constantly talk up the value of family and yet we live lives which essentially undermine the family at every turn.

At the heart of Green politics, and one of the things that I really want to try and get across today, is the acknowledgement of responsibilities that goes way beyond that rather facile ephemeral list that I have just given you. Responsibilities to the Earth and all its creatures, responsibilities to all people living on that Earth now and responsibilities to all future generations, the so-called ‘inter- generational’ aspect of responsibility, which necessarily takes us into a very different kind of social contract than that which appears to be on offer through the communitarian movement today. As David Orr has been pointing out for the last decade in many of his books on ecological literacy, the conservatism of a genuine ecological social contract owes much to the work of Edmund Burke, one of the first and most profound thinking conservatives in modern history and, I have to say, one of the least read. What he said about the social contract is this:

The social contract exists between those who are
living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.
Through this contract freedom should not be interpreted as individual
libertarianism but rather that stale of things in which liberty is secured
only by the equality of restraint.
-Edmund Burke

Now that is such a hugely crucial idea to put into the political domain today that I sometimes wonder whether the Green movement understands the power of its own thinking in this area.

Where is that equality of restraint today? Where in anything that postures as conservatism today do you actually find anything that has anything genuinely to do with conservatism? For conservatism as a political movement has been taken over lock, stock and barrel by the insidious virus of neo-liberal individualism. As David Orr goes on to say, what is it today that is particularly conservative about handing over the governance of society to unfettered market forces and presuming they will do a better job than governance? What is conservative about squandering our heritage, be it natural, cultural or built? What is conservative about disregarding the advice of scientists on crucial issues like global warming, ozone depletion, loss of bio-diversity? What indeed is conservative about destroying all those things in people’s lives that give them any lasting sense of continuity, of familiarity, of even semi-permanence, in a world that is changing so fast around them?

None of that features anywhere in today’s interpretation of conservatism but it features very large indeed in Green politics. Now that is part of our politics and we are, I think, foolishly nervous about articulating that part. We are nervous of being dubbed right wing, having spent most of our lives being nervous about being dubbed left wing. It’s funny really. Chancellor Kohl’s bruising comment that all Greens are the same—they start out Green and they end up Red, they’re just like tomatoes —still hurts!

The third aspect of communitarianism today rather long-windedly reconfirms the importance of voluntary action, self- reliance, more independent forms of wealth creation and distribution in the local economy, what some economists describe as the ‘gift economy’. That’s been part and parcel of Green economic thinking for the best part of 25 years and it’s good to see it now vested, centred, in another form of political expression. But you can’t help thinking that when you hear it articulated in those terms today, it represents a very frail form of communitarianism, what I would call ‘elastoplast communitarianism’. Because basically what it is about is treating the casualties, the ‘walking wounded’, the left-overs, the human detritus, if you like, of our failure any longer to make the global economy work in the way that it once did.

It doesn’t yet seem apparent to politicians that the global economy can’t deliver the goods. It cannot deliver both a permanently exponentially growing economy and something like full employment. The reason why it can’t, and this is very simple economics, is that the only way to become more productive and therefore to get exponential economic growth is by getting rid of people by systematically downsizing the economy at every turn. This is not something that can be magically glossed over. It is one of the inherent contradictions in contemporary industrialism. So, long before the oceans collapse or we all die of cancer through ozone depletion, or the swamp of humanity literally makes life impossible—long before that—our societies will implode simply because we cannot find a mechanism of giving people access to gainful, meaningful work in the global economy.

So, for Greens, when we talk about the local economy, about more self-reliance, when we talk about voluntary action and alternative patterns of wealth creation, we are not talking about a ‘make and mend’ palliative to the global economy, we are talking about a strategic commitment to a different way of generating wealth. It is at long last beginning to dawn on people that this is not an ‘also- ran’, second class, can’t-quite-make-it-in- the-real-world type economy, this is actually the economy on which all our futures depend. So, it’s nice to hear the communitarians talking a little bit about the local economy, but what exactly do they think they mean by it? Not enough.

The fourth one is that just as the state was once seen as being at the heart of collectivism, and market forces were once seen as being at the heart of capitalism, so community is seen as being at the heart of post-modernism. I’m not going to talk about this for very long because I actually don’t know what post-modernism is. What I do know is that the language of post-modernism remains very narrowly technocratic, very narrowly to do with our manipulation and management of society and people. So what does eco-communitarianism add here? Well, it adds something absolutely revolutionary. It adds the notion of community as a living, integrated system, embedded in a living community, not just a biological community but a human community as well. People are beginning to understand that we cannot separate ourselves off from the rest of those living systems; we are intricately connected to them and indeed our well-being and livelihoods depend on them.

Lastly, communitarianism today has a very powerful strand of ethics. There is a strong sense of there being a breakdown in the moral order, of us not adequately addressing the degree to which that moral superstructure has now disappeared, leaving people in a kind of detached moral limbo. There is a growing horror at the degree to which our economic systems seem to depend on the cultivation of greed, aggression and self-interest. However, as articulated by conventional communitarians, there is something disturbingly nostalgic about this, backward looking to an innocent age, a Golden Age that, quite frankly, never existed. Well, again, what do the eco-communitarians add to that? Well, we add a spirituality to the ethical dimension of communitarianism, an unashamed spirituality, in a world that still treats people that talk about the spirit as somehow rather peculiar. And being at Findhorn I don’t have to say any more about that.

I think that eco-communitarianism is a revolution in waiting. It’s the most astonishing body of ideas, principles and practice that the world has ever seen. And yet the funny thing is that we tend to find ourselves talking to ourselves about it, largely. I’m worried that we don’t spend more time on each of these different points, talking to those for whom they have a natural sympathy. When you talk about community as place, as embedded culture, for instance, why do we find it so difficult to communicate that essence to farmers, whom we still so often, so easily and so cheaply demonise as the destroyers of the Earth today? When we talk about community as social contract, why do we find it so difficult to talk to conventional politicians about what we mean by that? Why do we find it so difficult to talk to business people about the concept of living livelihoods? We’ve heard several times already that they are part of the problem, indeed some people wish to depict them as evil incarnate in the world today.

I think this is short-sighted, immature posturing of the worst kind. There is a continuing failure on the part of the Green movement to find the right language and the right discourse to engage people within the business network in a different kind of way. We need to talk to business people, engineers, professionals, you name it, anybody who will listen to the growing authority of Green ideas. So, now all those people are there, waiting to be talked to, let me ask you a rhetorical question. Who do we actually end up talking to? Me talking to me, and me talking to me and me talking to you. We spend an awful lot of time talking to ourselves. We are very nervous about talking to people outside of our charmed circle and we lend to fall into five very serious traps. (This is the confessional bit.) So what are those, what are our sins?

The first one I call ‘masturbationism’. Masturbationism is safe, it’s quite fun, it doesn’t make you blind (there’s irrefutable scientific evidence to that effect) but I’ve noticed when I talk to people about masturbationism that they do prefer to do it with their eyes closed, so they might just as well be blind. The great problem about masturbationism is that it doesn’t really go much further than yourself. So the first rule, as it were, in terms of this new paradigm of eco- communitarianism is, ‘Don’t do it with yourself, do it with someone else’. It’s much more fun anyway, and you might actually end up giving birth to something new.

The second sin which we have to collectively confess here today is what I call ‘escapism’. There is still the phenomenon of Greens opting out, seeking refuge in eco-communities or eco-villages because they basically can’t bear the horrors of the unsustainable, cruel and sometimes immoral world in which they live. So the second rule of eco-communitarianism is, ‘Don’t opt out, opt in’. I’ve already mentioned that we can opt in through local Agenda 21, we can opt in through engagement in the wider community, in political parties, in any single number of ways that you want. But opting out is a lethal, self-indulgence which we cannot afford any longer.

The third sin, linked to that, is ‘isolationism. Now by isolationism I really mean that, because it exists, because we’re doing it, that’s OK, that’s enough, we don’t have to do anything more about that.  I sometimes think that Rupert Sheldrake is responsible for this phenomenon. Rupert (who is a very good friend of mine and I enjoy his work enormously) came up with the theory of morphogenetics. Morphogenetics basically says that there is some mysterious force at work which means that if something happens somewhere, well, pretty soon it can start happening somewhere else. So, if monkeys start washing their fruit in one part of the world, hey presto, morphogenetically, they start washing their fruit somewhere else; if there are six barrels at Findhorn one day, there are 60 barrels in the whole of the UK the next and six months later there are 60 million barrels and pretty soon the whole planet looks like a superannuated brewery. That’s basically what isolationism is all about: don’t talk about it, we’ve done it; if anyone wants to find out about it, come and look at it for yourself or it’ll just happen mysteriously. Well it won’t. Of course, it doesn’t. It never does. So, don’t isolate yourself, communicate.

The fourth sin is what I call ‘alternativism’. I speak here as a member of the Green Party, OK? The Green Party knows a lot about alternativism. It loves its alternativism. It cannot bear the thought that it might ever have to engage in the mainstream. It cannot bear the consequence that one day it might actually be held to be orthodoxy. This is the most paralysingly frightening prospect for most members of the Green Party. So we cultivate our alternativism as much as we possibly can and in so doing, of course, we tend to give people a rather strange impression of what we’re all about. We tend to imply that, “Well, yes, we have got this rather brilliant idea about dealing with human waste, with sewages waste actually, but it’s a bit alternative, you know. Yes, that’s really how it happens. Yes, I know, it’s pretty whacky, isn’t it? Yes.” And in so doing, we lend to marginalise ourselves, even with those people who would naturally fall in line with much of what we are doing. So, cut the alternativism, get into the mainstream, as fast as you possibly can.

Now, lastly, moral superiority, perhaps the biggest sin of them all. We’ve had a bit of it, just a tiny bit of it every now and then—I know it, I can intuitively feel the sort of residues of it from the days gone by and a little bit from what’s gone before—and part of that moral superiority is that we end up demonising people in the way I’ve suggested, demonising people who may in fact only be weak, incompetent, scared at the fact that they have been deserted by the gods that once served them, and in many respects, unable to deal with the challenge that is laid upon them now, not always, but very often. At the same time, we identify demons in order to suit ourselves, where there may only be our own alter egos. So, don’t demonise, empathise. And if you can’t empathise, subvert.

So those are the five essences of eco- communitarianism. What you have there is a model for eco-communitarianism in the real world, engaging with people in partnerships to make these ideas and projects have a far bigger currency than they currently have. I know ‘partnership’ is the kind of word that leads everybody to glow warmly and greenly and so on and so forth but partnership is hellishly hard work. It is really difficult and those who are trying to put together what are rather stupidly called ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ through the local Agenda 21 process are learning at first hand how difficult it is. First of all you have to start talking English before you can actually have any partnership and secondly you have to start giving things up. No partnership works if you expect everybody simply to join you where you already are. You have to be prepared to join people where they are too.

We actually all know what the source of our strength is in this movement and we don’t necessarily have to have it visibly present in front of us at every stage of our lives. We all know what that common core of human values is—that love of humankind, that reverence for the Earth, that compassion for people in the world today—we know that and we can share it even as we go out with it. So, I would like to encourage you to go back to your cosmically resonating ‘Green Acres’ and basically walk your talk, do your stuff. Do it in the way that we know we are capable of doing it and then just watch and see things change.

Jonathon Porritt is the author of ‘Seeing Green and ‘Save the Earth’.