ABSTRACT
Many of these movement have contributed to the beginnings of political thinking which not only does not sit within the old divisions of collectivist and libertarian, or socialist, liberal and conservative, but has no obvious relationship either with the fluid categories of left and right, pluralist or feminist. A concern with the environment, and a desire to ‘tread lightly on the earth’ is associated with a post-industrial mood, and may be informed both by collective conscience and by a deep worry about the quality of human life. It is clearly political, but when attempts have been made to throw bridges across to either old or new bodies of political thinking (Gray 1993a; Red-Green 1995), the structures have been too rickety to take any serious traffic.
