Green Mass Group is an effort by concerned global citizens (who happen to live in the state of Massachusetts) to build an online community that will engage in a political discourse that is rooted in reality and steeped in compassion.
We have seen the word “Green” robbed of its meaning and we will use this site to reclaim it.
The Green movement is an ecological movement, based on the idea that the whole human experiment is part of nature and not separate from it. Human systems are subject to nature’s laws whether we like it or not. Human endeavors are inextricably linked to our biosphere. Our health and well-being is intricately connected to the health and well-being of plant and animal species across the planet. Our economic, social, and political systems cannot change this simple fact — they must reflect it.
The environmental movement of the 20th century has died a quiet death. The isolation of the “environment” as an issue has sucked it of any life force. The symbol of cute polar bears as an innocent victim of human arrogance and neglect misses an important point — that humans are themselves an exquisite experiment worth saving.
The ecological movement of the 21st century is in its infant stages. Green Parties across the world are struggling to distinguish themselves and forge a new kind of politics. Decentralized grassroots movements are springing up everywhere, finding their voice and building power. Co-optation, corruption, and cluelessness abound. In the United States, powerful forces are at play to squash successful challenges to the status quo, and the playing field is tilted sharply against the Greens.
In Massachusetts there is a unique opportunity for a breakthrough. This one-party state has seen such a clear erosion of its small-d democratic facade, that it is ripe for a voter revolt. Uncontested elections, corrupt politicians, and closed-door decision-making have left elected officials completely unaccountable and shredded the credibility of Beacon Hill. As a percentage of the voting eligible population in Massachusetts of 4,652,749 people, the biggest block of people are those who are registered Unenrolled (45%), followed by registered Democrats (33%), followed by those who are registered but don’t vote (22%), followed by those who are eligible to vote but are not registered (11%), followed by registered Republicans (10%). These numbers speak to massive disillusionment with the two-party system generally and the one-party system in Massachusetts, as well as an opportunity for the Green-Rainbow Party or another “third party” to become the second party.
Furthermore, Massachusetts is a progressive, pioneering state with a proud history of revolutionary fervor. Its student populations and universities can be engaged in groundbreaking ways. The expertise and ingenuity of the people of Massachusetts can be unleashed upon the converging crises of the day. Armies of the unemployed and underemployed can be put to work bringing about the local Green economies of our post-carbon future. We can begin the work of taking back the planet from profiteers
driven by shortsighted greed, building the world we want to see based on justice, sustainability, cooperation and compassion.
#
Yep, we the need to reclaim the label “green” from the hordes of hawkers, politicians, and green-washers and to re-invest it with its true and historic significance. Glad to see the reference to “revolutionary fervor,” as well, since “revolution” is another word that probably requires some cleaning up as well. It’s gotten a bad rap-with reason, of course, as most political revolutions are bloody affairs culminating in show trials, retribution, and counter-revolutionary terror that send more than their share of innocent bystanders to the guillotine, the firing squad,or the Gulag. It’s one thing waking up to Rahm Emenuel each morning; Robespierre, Che, or Beria quite another. And, of course, after the dancing in the streets comes the inevitable morning after (as Obama fans know all too well):
There’s nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are out-phased, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And their beards have all grown longer overnight
And in the United Sates and Europe, of course, the word’s been further tainted by lingering memories of the strident militancy of the sixties and seventies: Weather Underground, the SLA, Brigades Rosse, Baader-Meinhof, and so on.
But in the case of Greens, the literal meaning of the term-a revolving ’round and a turnin’ back to sources-is more than applicable. “Revolution” eschews a blind faith in “progress,” defined these days by a plethora of HD big screen plasma televisions and technocratic solutions to every problem-and the technology of the day, alas, tends to focus on short-term fixes with no sense of long-term consequences. The “Green Revolution” of the 1960s is a case in point: promising an explosion of foodstuffs to alleviate world hunger-and delivering on that promise-the agricultural programs fostered by Norman Borlaug and numerous philanthropic institutes created a new system of global food production which relied entirely on the inputs derived from fossil fuels. Traditional farming methods-permaculture, polyculture, agroecology-were jettisoned in favor of monoculture, heavy tillage, and the application of billions of pounds of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The long-term result? A global food system run by a small cartel of producers, processors, distributors, seed suppliers, and synthetic fertilizer and pesticide manufacturers, in league with a WTO that has literally driven small farmers around the world to suicide, that is running aquifers dry, losing thousands of tons of topsoil annually, making high-fructose corn syrup the national staple here in the US-oh, and, uh, yeah-people are still hungry, An analogous situation exists today when it comes to climate change: in order to support our current levels of consumption in light of peak oil and global warming, the technocrats look to nuclear and hydrogen power,
Greens are not, by and large, antimodernist luddites. But we are revolutionary in that rather looking to technology to fix what ails us, we are willing to take a step back and ask questions of a more fundamental nature-rather than, “how can we preserve our culture?” starting with, perhaps, “is this culture really WORTH preserving?”
In other words: the green movement aims at a cultural revolution. This web site uses the word “wisdom” in its description, and that’s a word which ordinarily lights up my skeptics’ radar, but it’s relevant here: “wisdom” is associated with age, with knowledge that has survived the test of time and proved itself. It’s something that our youth-and-futuristically-obsessed culture doesn’t much value. But it could be that the twentieth century, with its headlong embrace of every new technology dreamt up in a lab-is anomalous, and that while there’s ever so much to be appreciated-vaccinations, electric guitars, YouTube-a genuinely revolutionary outlook allows us to view with a critical eye some of our less felicitous “advances”: suburbia, biotechnological excess, a globalized commercial system that’s often nothing other than economic imperialism, a food system that has our dinners traveling an average of some 1800 miles to our plates, nuclear weapons and energy, an all-pervasive mass media-that list goes on and on.
Looking back-thinking in terms of “wisdom” rather than convenience-and then turning back-is a revolutionary act, and I hope that the 2010’s bring the same kind of fervor to that variety of revolution that the 20th century did to colonial and other revolutions. On both the personal level, as we re-localize our individual behaviors-but also on the political level, as we work to elect green-minded leadership who’ll represent our desires, not to turn back the clock in every instance, but to re-learn to respect traditions (agricultural, economic, and sociological) that we’ll need to survive in a period that’s going to be characterized by the effects of peak oil and declining superpower status.