40 years ago
In 1983 the Green Party of Germany (Die Grünen) won 5.5% of the national vote, qualifying it for 27 seats in the Bundestag, West Germany’s parliament. They were the second European Green Party, after the Greens in Belgium, to win multiple federal parliamentary seats. In achieving such success, the West German Greens drew support from the popular domestic movement opposing the deployment of Pershing II cruise missiles on West German soil by NATO and from various other social movements.
Californians Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra went to Germany that summer, did extensive research, and then wrote a definitive, early study of the West German Green Party — Green Politics: The Global Promise. Published in March 1984, it provided insights into the challenges Die Grünen had faced as they sought to create a new eco-social politics and to form a new kind of party. The book was based on over 60 interviews with German Greens and conveyed to an American audience the Four Pillars of the international Green politics movement: ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy, and non-violence. It received several positive reviews in American newspapers and became a primer for those seeking to start a Green Party in the United States. The final chapter, “The Green Alternative — It Can Happen Here,” inspired many to believe that this was possible, even during the depths of the Reagan years. Indeed, only six months after Green Politics was published the founding conference of a new movement in the United States was held that August at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
During the summer Charlene Spretnak, Harry Boyte (author of The Backyard Revolution and a founding member of Democratic Socialists of America), and bioregionalist David Haenke jointly decided to form a planning committee for the conference. They invited Catherine Burton (founder of Earth Bank in Seattle) and Gloria Goldberg (of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont) to join them and then sent a letter to over a hundred activist organizations working for peace, ecology, social justice, civil rights, feminism, veterans’ rights, and other issues. Each organization was invited to send one or two representatives to the conference. Only a few dozen did so. Understandably, most of the groups wanted to wait and see what this new Green Party would be like.
During the three-day conference, attended by 62 activists, many sessions were held on ways to move forward, as well as on brainstorming Green values. The attendees decided that the best course of action would be to spend several years seeding Green ideas locally across the country since few people at that point understood what Green eco-social politics was all about. A national clearinghouse was established in Minneapolis and regional representatives were selected to serve on a steering committee. In the closing session the attendees approved the formation of a committee to compose a draft of a values statement, which they subsequently titled the Ten Key Values.
The original Ten Key Values (Ecological Wisdom, Personal/Social Responsibility, Grassroots Democracy, Nonviolence, Decentralization, Community-based Economics, Post-patriarchal Values, Respect for Diversity, Global Responsibility, Future Focus/Sustainability) reached many people by being published in the paperback edition of Green Politics in 1986. The values turned out to be not only a philosophical framework and an organizing tool, but also a major factor in the sustained unity of the U.S. Greens. In 2001, when the Global Greens were founded in Canberra, Australia, and a Global Green Charter was approved by the parties of 72 countries, the U.S. Green’s Ten Key Values document was cited as one of the inspirational source documents behind the creation of the Charter.
