How the environmental movement got serious

Too often in the past there was a gap between the soft centre of green thinking and political reality

It's safe to predict that the World Summit on sustainable development will not achieve the headline goals that it has set itself, from ending deforestation to reducing water shortages. But if you watch the way the debates are going, there is one thing you can say for sure. Environmentalism is now wearing a serious political face.

Over the last 10 years, if you talked to people who called themselves green, many of them didn't seem all that interested in the big bad world of politics. There was a lot of emphasis on single issues, and each of these single issues was often taken down to lifestyle choices. If you were worried about climate change, you should be insulating your loft. If you were worried about water pollution, you shouldn't be flushing away your tampons.

For a while in the Nineties, I worked in my spare time with a well-meaning women's environmental organisation. For all its wonderful intentions, its concrete achievements were mainly along the lines of getting more women to buy reusable nappies and sanitary towels. This seemed to be the goal of so many green groups at that time: to change the lifestyles of a few individuals.

Green believers had a good handle on things that you could do day by day on a personal basis, from wearing unbleached cotton to buying cosmetics that weren't tested on animals. A typical Nineties family who bought into environmental awareness could see their commitment as a series of good deeds. They could push a dozen bottles into a bottle bank, they could buy a pound of fairtrade coffee, then if they were really committed they could put their potato peelings on their compost heap and go on a yoga holiday in Oxfordshire instead of a villa break in Tuscany. Keeping faith with the environmental movement has often been seen as simply making a series of personal choices in one's shopping, eating and travelling habits.

Indeed, more than one newspaper, to tie in with the World Summit on sustainable development, has recently offered readers tips on "50 ways you can save our planet". These have included using an electric razor instead of disposable ones, buying chocolates from "proper chocolate stores", so that they are not individually wrapped, and wrapping up Christmas presents in fabric.

At least these choices allow people to make a difference, however small, and give them a feeling of power. But how real is that sense of power? For a start, however green you like to think you are, it is only a matter of time before one good deed is going to be drowned out by a bad one. This newspaper's recent analysis of the environmental damage caused by a quiet night in is proof enough of that. Most of us are not just too lazy and selfish, but also too unsure of whether the outcomes will make a jot of difference, to do a tenth of the things that we are enjoined to do.

It is also the case that not everyone can afford to make the choices that the green movement seemed to require. Sheherazade Goldsmith, in a feature in yesterday's Telegraph, presented the perfect image of the green consumer. She appeared with arms full of vine tomatoes and lettuces, extolling the wonders of eating only seasonal food. She spends half her time on her farm in Devon and the rest at the family home in London, where she says it is easy to shop from farmers' markets and by mail order from organic producers.

How many people in Britain can get their food this way? For so many, pushed for time and money, the choices are simply made for them by the corner shop or the local supermarket.

Of course an awful lot of environmentalists in the UK have always done a lot more than go shopping. Hell, some of them have gone and lived in trees to save our countryside. But however fierce the commitment, too often in the past there seemed to be a gap between the soft centre of green thinking and the hard edges of political reality. That was understandable. After all, it's a lot more pleasant to talk about Gaia than GATTs, about positive thinking than poverty.

Indeed, the least acceptable – to my mind – aspect of the green movement up until now has been its occasional romanticisation of poverty. I have talked to Western environmentalists who have told me completely seriously that beggars out on the streets in India are much happier than Londoners sitting in their gas-guzzling cars. "They just don't have the misery that all our excess brings us," one such chap told me, wide-eyed.

But this kind of woolly thinking need no longer be seen as characteristic of the people who want to save the planet. Although the "anti-globalisation" movement has often been mocked, the series of protests that focused on global justice have produced a series of impressive alliances and concrete proposals.

Now, if you listen to the spokespeople from many diverse environmental groups, or tap into the websites or books of all sorts of activists from Vandana Shiva to George Monbiot, what you hear is not so much personal exhortation as concrete political analysis. Rather than taking single issues back to your shopping and washing habits, you are more likely to find that those single issues are linked one with another into larger global picture.

So those who are worried about climate change are now as likely to be agitating about global targets on fossil fuel emissions as about putting more lofts in order. Those who want to encourage the consumption of more locally produced food might be going off to do their shopping at farmers' markets, but they might also be questioning the system of agricultural subsidies that makes some imported food so much cheaper than food grown round the corner.

This more hard-edged political analysis of green issues is also filtering through into the mainstream. It is fascinating to see how the anti-globalisers' emphasis on unfair trade rules and on unregulated corporate behaviour has translated into the concerns of the media as they gather to report the World Summit. Even The Times, yesterday, joined the call to slash agricultural subsidies in rich countries to give the poor a chance.

And in a context where people are eager to look beyond their own backyard for solutions, alliances are now being forged across many different countries. Even though the politicians at the World Summit may not come to any real agreements, other meetings may prove fruitful. For sure, there is no reason for optimism. Organic farmers from Britain may meet up with small farmers from Andhra Pradesh and decide that they all want fewer subsidies for corporate agriculture and more support for traditional farming methods in their home provinces. But that does not mean that either the farmers from Britain or the farmers from Andhra Pradesh will necessarily find that their voices carry any weight against more powerful forces ranged against them.

Yet these alliances that are being forged between North and South may do more than we can imagine. There is a lot that people can do for themselves, individually, if they choose, but some changes will never come about unless people act collectively.

n.walter@btinternet.com