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What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? 153
rise of oil prices made people aware of the danger of the exhaustion of
fossil fuel sources. Ihey put two and two together and realised that this
could be detrimental to their future; this made them receptive to green
views. In other words, they thought as could be expected from a
businessman. However, it is not this that happened; guite the contrary.
People became conscious of environmental issues in the last third of the
past century as part of a new form of social discontent, which had
nothing to do with economic trends. The children of the society of
plenty, who were able to enjoy the blessings of consumer mass culture
and experience the positive effects of a growing redistribution of wealth
by the state and strong trade unions, started to feel increasingly ill at
ease in the world of abundance imagined by their parents — and this has
lasted ever since. Not the plenty, but the dissatisfaction.
The complaints of the alternative movements, counter- and sub¬
cultures, dissatisfaction and civil disobedience that have developed from
the sixties have been directed not against the quantity of the produced
and consumable goods, but against the quality of life. Far from demanding
a higher share of the spoils for themselves, they rejected everything the
system had to offer in the areas of work, politics, their physical
environment and consumption. Their anti-system desires — that questioned
the reason for existence of the conditions of power — were called “radical”
needs. The documents of the contemporary counter-culture — including
green parties’ founding documents — gave equal weight to the soullessness
of work and the inhumanity of working conditions as the destruction of
the environment and the rejection of the consumerist way of life. Jonathon
Porritt, founder of the English Green Party, explains why. The majority
of critics of industrial society had yet to realise that “It is not alienation
from the means of production or even from the fruits of production that
really matters, but alienation from the process of the production that really
matters. The left has simply got hooked on the wrong thing. The
socialization of the means of production is all but irrelevant if the process
remains unchanged. This alienation, characteristic of all industrial
systems, capitalist or communist, is the key to understanding the kind of
changes we are going to have to make.””’ In my opinion, Porritt has
captured the heart of ecological politics, which is regularly missed by those
who create a philosophy for the protection of the environment. The
environment cannot be protected while for most people work remains a
27 Jonathon Porritt: Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained, p.81. Wiley — Blackwell,
Oxford, 1984.