ABSTRACT
In Chapter One of this book it was argued that it was possible to speak of a green movement as a transnational, though western, network of radical environmentalists linked by a collective identity. The green movement is a social movement within the more diffuse and broader environmental movement. The existence of this social movement can be discerned by the extent to which it meets four criteria of a collective identity, network ties between groups and individuals, participation in protest; and challenging existing forms of power, both cultural and structural. Green action is, like all social movement action, ideologically structured. The green ideology that was examined in Chapter Three was argued to be a broad framework based upon interdependent green commitments to ecological rationality, egalitarianism, and participatory and decentralised democracy. This ideology is indentifiable in its most elaborated form in the programmes and statements of green parties, but it can also be found in direct action networks and the more radical of the green environmental movement organisations. The sources of this ideology, as was argued in Chapter Two, seem best explained by the distinctive experiences shared by the social groups which make up the core of the activists in green movements. The importance of experience and its effect on the development of a diverse green movement, was defined through the idea of the collective learning of a political generation, embracing the new knowledge of the ecological crisis, the antiauthoritarian, global and radical democratic ideas of the New Left and the experience of greens in other social movements and in welfare-oriented professions.
