An Open Letter to the FireDogLake Community

{Cross posted at FireDogLake}

Dear friends at FDL,

I come to you with open arms, an open mind, and an open heart. I read your analysis and commentary and reporting and informed discussions, and I am grateful for all of it. It is heads and tails more open-minded and thoughtful than other similar progressive blogs, even those on your blogroll. FDL gives me hope. But then I take a look at your blog family, and your affiliation with the Blue America / Act Blue fundraising PAC, and my heart sinks. Ultimately I yearn to know the answer… how open-minded is the FDL community?

I write this as a Green activist, an active member of the Green-Rainbow Party — the Massachusetts affiliate of the Green Party of the U.S. I like to think that my allegiance to the Green Party is not rigid, or dogmatic, or permanent, or tunnel-based – the types of things that made Ralph Nader promise his father on his deathbed (as the story goes) that he wouldn’t ever join a political party. I myself am brimming with criticism of the Green Party. But it’s constructive criticism, because I think we desperately need to make the Green Party viable in the United States and around the world. Any global ecology-based movement will do, so long as it does not shy away from the difficult, frightening, and often-nauseating terrain of modern-day politics.  

[A note from the Stein campaign]

Dear friends and supporters,

Despite 40 years of successful Earth days, our environment is at greater risk today than ever before. We face an increasingly threatened climate, unabated oil addiction, expansion of polluting coal and biomass plants, degradation of forests and fisheries, shrinking open space, ongoing toxic threats and senseless wars that are as harmful to the climate as they are to global security. On this Earth Day, let us make a new commitment to the vision of a whole and healthy planet – to a revitalized grassroots democracy, new leadership, and green economic transformation. Each of these are critical if we are to stop the ongoing destruction and achieve the healthy, just, secure green future we deserve.

This article was written in response to this post at GreenChange.org

“We are neither left nor right; we are in front.”

-a Green slogan

I learned more about the Green Party from two old books* and two old white dudes** in my local chapter than anywhere else. I joined the party in 2001 and voted for its presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, but it took me over ten years to even begin to get a sense of what it’s really all about.

There are some major things that distinguish the Greens from simply being more progressive than, or to the left of, the Democrats. I’d say the single-most important point is that the Green Party is an ecological political party, trying to establish an “ecological politics” in a country whose politics — left and right — has a fundamental disconnect with reality.

I hope to develop a better understanding of what ecological politics means in practice and theory both, but my simplistic version is that Greens view our economic, social, and political structures as complex systems of interrelated parts, all of which are ultimately woven into a greater fabric of natural systems — the environment our human-constructed systems are fully dependent upon, the solar system, and beyond.