Australian Left Review
Article Title
The Politics of Ecology
Abstract
The recent Stockholm conference on the environment, which I visited for a few days, illustrated to perfection the evasiveness of orthodox thinking on ecological and related problems. The evasiveness is, of course, inevitable since any thorough analysis of the situation prevailing in the world today is bound, if conducted with an open mind, to reach conclusions not only uncomfortable to, but also unacceptable to, the politicians of the world. The official conference in fact battled might and main throughout its proceedings to banish politics, thus totally nullifying its deliberations. The acrobatics involved in demonstrating the irrelevance of politics to questions of the environment gave rise to the derogatory designation of “circus” to the conference. In this note I should like to open up a discussion on the politics of ecology.