Maybe they just don’t get it
The YES (Young Eco-Socialist) Caucus of the Green Party says that the Elders Caucus is rife with “reactionary” and “old-school” thinking.
What I find kind of ironic is this: Some of those saying we are “old school” are coming from a place that I think is actually very retrograde!
Many of the early (and now elder) Greens were drawn to Green politics on the basis of how very alternative and far-sighted a lot of the new thinking was during the 1980s and 1990s. That was the period of Earth First! and Deep Ecology and bioregionalism. We were reading Dwellers in the Land, Ecotopia, and The Haudenosaunee Address to the Western World.
How unfortunate that some of those very visionary ideas have been relegated to the back burner . . . sometimes in favor of a stale old kind of neo-leftism, a kind that Green politics was formulated to transcend!
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There are instances in history where the answer is broached, is too new to be comprehended at first, and then is forgotten . . . only to be re-visited and finally embraced at a later time.
Our contemporary Samuel Alexander picks up where Gary Snyder left off:
https://bioneers.org/four-changes-by-gary-snyder/
But Alexander says our culture, even now, is not yet ready for the kind of changes Snyder envisioned fifty years ago ... “with consumer affluence and techno-optimism still at the heart of mainstream conceptions of the ‘good life.’ Nonetheless, it is important to keep alive the ideas of what an ecocentric, post-capitalist economy could look like, for in a crisis what today seems impossible or implausible can suddenly become possible and even probable.”
