The idea of ‘green politics’ is implicitly self-limiting. Unlike the blue that we associate with the right, or the red we associate with the left, green is taken to refer to the substance of a political ideology: to the natural world of plants and trees, to ‘pristine’ nature and ‘unspoiled’ wilderness. As such, it tends to reproduce a simplistic distinction between humanity and nature – a distinction that is inseparable from the very environmental crises through which green politics proposes to steer us. Consciously or otherwise, environmentalism is constructed as something to do with the world’s ‘green spaces’, as opposed to a politics of human transformation.
Beyond Green by Lesley Head
Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 252 pp
Human/Nature by Jane Rawson
NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 213 pp
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