Prologue by William Shepherd
This extended essay has been many years in the making and is still only a collection of sketches of the larger work which, if it has literary roots, then these were planted by such men as Tom Paine and Alexis De Tocqueville two hundred years ago.The work, as it currently stands, has been prepared as a single whole, only being broken down for the convenience of the reader into chapters after the writing was complete. As an intermediate stage, the old fashioned literary technique, now sadly out of favour, of providing a running commentary on the essay was used to compile a shorthand for the development of the essay and the ideas it contains.
The germ of the essay and the reason to retain the title despite the rather more wide ranging nature of the subject matter are best explained by the fact that it was the success of the Green Party in the Swedish parliamentary elections in September 1988 which first led to a much shorter essay speculating on the future of the greens.
But then in June of 1989 the British Green Party gave an unexpectedly strong performance in the European elections and this was sufficient to prompt me to suspect that there was now an audience out there interested in understanding the deep ecology of the green phenomenon.
George Orwell in 1939 commented when assessing the political side of Charles Dickens and his work that if you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only remedy left is education. The real world is such a wonderful muddle that such clear cut categories for human action will always merge into one another in practice.
The power of violence, politics and education are not evil or good things in themselves. There will always be a time and place for each of them, either separately or in combination with the others. Our problems arise when common sense loses control and the size and speed of our application of these things becomes either too great or too small. Then that which is good becomes evil.
The intention behind this work is to establish the intellectual context in which the advocates of tolerance and moderation can maintain the cause of justice and reason and the sanctity of common sense in a world moving towards intolerance and excess.
William Shepherd
Canterbury, Kent
18th June 1989