From vision to reality

As we have seen, the environmental movement emerged at a time when many of us could imagine, along with John Lennon, that there was no such thing as country, or possessions, or religion: that there was, or could be, a “brotherhood of man.” As those counter-cultural, neo-romantic sentiments have faded into the collective memory, the dreams, or visions, of yesteryear have run up against a number of very real constraints and counterforces, among which the inbred traditions of national political cultures have been among the more intractable. Nationalisms and provincialisms have been reinvented with a vengeance over the past thirty years, and they have twisted and counterattacked everything that has come in their path. In relation to environmentalism, national political cultures have all but obliterated the visionary, universalizing ambitions of the environmental movement, and one of the results has been that the emerging ecological culture has been configured into so many national shades or shapes of green.

Whether we like it or not, it has become ever more apparent that there are significant national differences in the ways in which societies function.