Edward Goldsmith: A Grandfather of the Green Politics Movement

[This article is excerpted and adapted from one having the same title that appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Green Horizon Magazine.]

“In 1966 it dawned upon me that the industrial society in which we live and that we take to be normal, desirable and permanent, is in fact aberrant and destructive, and that rather than further increase our dependence upon it, we should, on the contrary, reduce such dependence. It was to argue the case for such a policy that in 1969, I, together with a few like-minded colleagues, set up The Ecologist magazine and that we published, three years later, our “Blueprint for Survival” which obtained a lot of publicity and helped trigger off what is now the Green Party in the UK.”

—Edward Goldsmith

Edward Goldsmith died in 2009. By that time a profound new ideology had become recognized by electorates worldwide as a significant political alternative. Even in the United States, where contestation has supposedly been narrowed to a dyadic relationship between two catch-all “umbrella-ideology” parties, voters have started to get a sense of there being four viable choices—in addition to the establishment Republicans and Democrats, candidates of two minor-but-enduring parties regularly appear on ballots and get included in polling surveys: the Libertarians and the Greens.

In England, Teddy Goldsmith’s 1972 treatise “A Blueprint for Survival” was a major inspiration for the embryonic political party at first called “Peoples.” It held its initial public meeting in February 1973 in Coventry. Though it went through some name changes during its early years (from “Peoples” to “Ecology” to “Green”) it was later recognized as the first Green Party in Europe.

After publishing his “Blueprint” in The Ecologist magazine, Goldsmith had founded an organization called Movement for Survival. He merged it with the fledgling party in 1974. The “Blueprint” became their “Manifesto for Survival” (re-issued in expanded form in 1975 as “A Manifesto for a Sustainable Society”). The party invited him to stand for the Eye Township parliamentary constituency in Suffolk as their candidate in the February 1974 general election. His campaign focused on the threat of desertification from the intensive farming practiced in the area … which he emphasized with the help of a Bactrian camel! He campaigned all around the constituency accompanied by the camel and supporters dressed in the garb of Arab sheiks, the implication being that if modern oil-intensive farming practices were allowed to continue, the camel would be the only viable means of transport left in Suffolk. His unorthodox campaign succeeded in attracting the media’s attention and highlighted the issues. He again ran for office for the then-renamed Ecology Party in the European Parliament elections of 1979.

Goldsmith worked toward a goal of having the destructiveness of the industrial growth paradigm become recognized all along the political spectrum. A dynamic speaker, he was much in demand on the lecture circuit. Among the hundreds of presentations he made over the course of many years, some were at the invitation of conservative-leaning organizations in various European countries and the US. The British left took him to task for it. He replied: “We must realize that we can only hope to win the critical battle we are fighting by getting the public on our side—and not just part of the public, but as much of it as possible. It is broad public pressure that can make governments change their policies. As it happens, almost half the population of a country like the UK or the US is made up of people who normally vote for Conservative or Republican governments. Just like liberal and left-wing voters they, also, must be converted to our cause if we want our children to have a life worth living on this planet.”

For the sake of forging a pathway toward sustainability and grassroots democracy Goldsmith gave us an image of a “Great U-Turn.” He understood, of course, that we can’t “go back” to any pristine or innocent earlier period—there are too many people now and we’ve done too much damage. But he emphasized that we need to make some kind of dramatic turn at this point in history. He maintained that simplification needs to be underpinned by a transformation of the modern worldview toward naturalism (in place of humanism), communitarianism (in place of individualism), and ecologism (in place of economism). His radically transformative vision was deeply green. He asserted that material sufficiency in an eco-communitarian society could provide the conditions for a diverse variety of meaningful, grounded, and fulfilling lifeways.

One reviewer said: “A Blueprint for Survival is the closest thing the Green politics movement has to a birth certificate.” The text comprised the entire issue of The Ecologist magazine (Vol. 2, No. 1, January 1972) in advance of the world’s first Environment Summit—the UN Conference held in Stockholm. The principal authors were Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen. Other colleagues contributed. So great was demand for the treatise that it was republished in book form in September of that year and went on to sell almost a million copies worldwide.

It was written 54 years ago, just ten years after the publication of Silent Spring had initiated the modern environmental movement. It’s a remarkable document for the year 1972, showing that Goldsmith was among a handful of prescient thinkers who fully appreciated the implications of the radically new paradigm that an ecological consciousness was spawning. He then took the step of crafting a Green political program based on the new movement and the new consciousness. After he ran for office promulgating that program, the development of Green parties proceeded apace.

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Teddy Goldsmith (1928-2009)

By Peter Bunyard 9/1/2009

[Peter Bunyard served for many years as the Science Editor of The Ecologist and then as Director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Universidad Sergio Arboleda in Colombia.]

Edward Goldsmith died on August 21st, in Tuscany, in his hill-top house, a converted convent, which overlooked one of his favorite places in all the world, no less than the medieval city of Siena. For Teddy, Siena embodied much of what he believed in: a human-scale city with ancient roots going back to the Etruscans, where civic pride and a vibrant living culture was the result of centuries of republicanism and popular participation in the running of the city and where everyone knew everyone else. And the Siennese acknowledged Teddy as one of their own, such that, when word got out, just days before his death, people flooded in from the city to pay their respects to a man whom they admired for his wisdom, humanity and, no less, his sense of fun.

Teddy Goldsmith, 80 when he died, has left us a lasting legacy of ecological thought as expressed particularly in his book The Way: An Ecological World View and as co-editor, with Jerry Mander, of The Case Against the Global Economy. But it will be as founder, publisher and editor of The Ecologist magazine that he will probably be best remembered.

When I was introduced to Teddy in 1968 it was shortly after Norman Lewis’s apocalyptic account in the Sunday Times of government-sponsored genocide in the Brazilian Amazon. One of the reactions to that article was the foundation of Survival International, the organization which, par excellence, has fought for indigenous rights across the planet, and it was there in the offices of the nascent organization that Teddy met Robin Hanbury-Tenison, its founder and director, as well as Robert Allen, who then became Teddy’s right-hand man in the launching of The Ecologist and was one of the writers of “A Blueprint for Survival.”

We had debated what to call The Ecologist and when we finally settled on the name we basically threw down the gauntlet to all those academics in their ivory towers who believed that ecology was their discipline and theirs alone. When Teddy attempted to join the British Ecological Society, his application was roundly rejected, a rejection which only confirmed him in his opinion that contemporary ecologists, with rare exception, did not understand the nature of ecology! As he later argued in the pages of the magazine and then in The Way, natural ecosystems are a composite of complex interacting systems which serve to provide stable conditions for the whole, thus resisting change. Teddy stressed that the wisdom of nature, the consequence of more than three billion years of evolution, manifested in an inclination toward homeostasis. He therefore very much embraced the ideas of the German-born Richard Goldschmidt, a distant relative, who had pioneered ideas on macro-evolution and who, like Teddy, could not conceive of the ecosystem as primarily a random assembly of disparate parts fighting for survival in a sea of competition.

Not surprisingly, Teddy found himself very much in agreement with Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge and their 1972 theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in which they stressed that the evolutionary pattern from the paleontological record showed long periods of stasis followed by abrupt change. Their theory was very much in line with the notion of cataclysmic events (abrupt climate change as in the Permian, for instance) bringing about mass extinctions leading to dramatic evolutionary change followed by an extended settling-down period in which life once again stabilized its local environment. Teddy, always the avid reader, was by then conversant with the General Systems Theory of the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who saw the emergence and evolution of ecosystems as the result of the relationships and interactions of the component organisms. Teddy extended that idea into the notion of the behavior of the parts being ordained by what was required to maintain the proper running and health of the next organizational level up. In essence, he stressed, the behavior of the parts should serve the requirements of the whole, just as a stable family structure would serve the community of which it was part and the community the well-being of the bioregion and so on, all the way up to “Gaia.” And, just as biologists tended to disdain the latter concept—for how could organisms comprising an ecosystem have any notion of how they should behave to satisfy the requirements of the whole?—so sociologists and behaviorists would not readily accept Teddy’s view that a society composed of atomized, alienated, disparate individuals could not but fail to generate a healthy community and, in consequence, a healthy environment.

The sociological economist Karl Polyani was another source of Teddy’s vision of the world. Polyani’s book The Great Transformation had a profound influence on how Teddy viewed the market and human interrelationships. The Stone Age Economics treatise of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and Roy Rappaport’s studies of the Tsembaga of New Guinea all contributed to Teddy’s conviction that a market, imposed from outside on a society rather than being embedded within it, would ultimately destabilize the society and cause its breakdown. Going still further, as he did in his book The Stable Society, Teddy believed that self-regulation and sustainability were unachievable in a capitalist market economy for the simple reason that such a market, with its ethos of perpetual growth, would override a community’s perception of ecological limits.

Teddy loathed totalitarian regimes, of whatever political color, and he reveled in the diversity of cultures and peoples. As an advocate of community integrity he saw danger were one culture to swamp and destroy another, as through the imposition of colonial rule or, as is happening now, through the global market and mechanisms such as the World Trade Organization which force their trade rules and terms of negotiation upon hapless communities. In fact, Teddy saw just how global trade, all in the name of “development,” had destroyed and was destroying traditional agriculture, particularly in countries such as India, with the net result of hundreds of millions of people being displaced from the land and having nowhere to go but to the slums of cities such as Delhi.

From the very beginning, Teddy used The Ecologist to express his views and to challenge the very tenets of capitalist-industrial society. As a result, when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth was published early in 1972, it provided him with the ammunition necessary for underpinning his conviction that our survival will be at stake unless we put in place policies for achieving sustainable living.

It was clear to him and to those of us working with him, that climate predictions based on purely physical parameters, while disregarding living organisms as a dynamic factor in the formation and tempering of climate, would misrepresent the changes caused through greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. As with so many environmental issues, and thanks to Teddy’s insights, we were ahead of the game. What we said, for example, in the special Ecologist issue on climate change in 1999 anticipated that which the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) later published in its Assessment Reports. 

Quite aside from his deep intellectual understanding of what was happening in the world, Teddy was always wholly engaged in direct action to generate change, whether against the World Bank for its grotesque investments in the building of massive dams or against the further construction of nuclear installations. And it was Teddy who initiated a protest against the proposed construction of a nuclear power plant in Luxulyan just 6 miles from the homes of Ecologist staff-members in Cornwall. That he did with considerable aplomb, sitting himself on a piece of farm machinery placed in the entrance of the field where the CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board) had decided to carry out test drillings. He refused to move, despite threats, and so the occupation of the site began, lasting for six months, until the CEGB finally went away!

It is not commonly known that Teddy, together with David Brower, the founder of the US branch of Friends of the Earth, established the idea of publishing a daily newspaper at major United Nation events. The first time those Eco Papers appeared was at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.

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After his passing, The Ecologist re-published an interview with Edward Goldsmith that Paul Kingsnorth, a former deputy editor, had conducted for their March 2007 issue.

It might be hard for today’s young, enthusiastic greenie to imagine a time when being an environmentalist was the minority pursuit of a few oddballs who society looked upon with the deepest suspicion. But those pathfinders paved the way for what we have now. Like many prophets, they weren’t recognized at the time. Some of them still aren’t. The world has moved on, and much of what they did to lay the groundwork for the spread, finally, of green ideas and practices has been forgotten. Such can be the fate of prophets.

The green prophets of those bygone days were no exception. There was Rachel Carson, author of the classic Silent Spring, which first warned of the dangers of pesticides and environmental chemicals. There was E. F. Schumacher, whose book Small Is Beautiful pioneered green economics. And there was Edward Goldsmith. Teddy was one of the most influential pioneers of the green movement, both in Britain and around the world. Determined, brave, inspiring, contradictory, stubborn, often right, sometimes wrong, frequently infuriating but always worth listening to, Teddy Goldsmith’s life and career have closely paralleled that of the modern green movement, of which he was one of the founders.

Teddy Goldsmith came from a family of wealthy bankers. His father, Major Frank Goldsmith, had been a Tory MP and his brother James went on to become a controversial billionaire. Teddy himself went up to Oxford University in the Forties to study politics, philosophy and economics. A mainstream, establishment career seemed to be beckoning. But it didn’t work out that way.

“I realized while I was at Oxford that everything I was being taught was nonsense,” he explains with typical directness. “Everything was compartmentalized. It was impossible to see the whole picture, or to get anyone else to do so. I found it all quite depressing, so I determined to find out why this was the case, and what the whole picture might be.’

Upon leaving university, family money gave him a certain leisure to go searching for it. He spent several years reading things that interested him, seeking out his version of a coherent worldview. “For a whole year, for example, I read about nothing but cybernetics,” he says. “But then anthropology grabbed me. It seemed to me that tribal societies had it right. The way they lived in a society with a social and ecological balance and stability seemed eminently sensible to me. After a while, I decided that reading about them was not enough, and that I wanted to see for myself.”

These days, views like this are commonplace. Back then, “primitive” tribal people were not regarded as having any lessons to teach the rich world. Quite the opposite: they needed to be brought into its hallowed circle. Victorian attitudes still prevailed. They were backward, unenlightened, in need of help. Teddy had other ideas, so he embarked on a world tour of tribal societies with his friend, naturalist John Aspinall. While Aspinall studied the wildlife of a region Teddy lived with the people, and learned lessons that he says have stuck with him ever since.

“I still have my notes from those days,” he says. “I spent a lot of time in Africa, in tribal societies, and one thing I became convinced of was that these were the only truly sustainable societies I had ever seen. That word is used a lot nowadays, but back then it meant nothing. It seemed extremely important to me, and here were people putting it into practice. Yet their very existence was threatened by the remorseless expansion of industrial society.”

When he returned to Britain, Teddy became involved in a fledgling organization known as the Primitive Peoples’ Fund (PPF), which later became Survival International. “The more I thought and read and saw,” he says, “the more it became clear to me how wide this problem was. Here were people talking about how these poor tribal people needed ‘development,’ and yet it was development that was destroying them. And it became clear to me that this applied to the wider society as a whole. Industrial development was responsible for the destruction of ecosystems the world over, and also for the destruction of human communities. It became clear to me that development was the problem, not the solution.”

Many things have changed in Teddy’s lifetime, but this is one idea which remains taboo today. From left to right, radical to mainstream, Tony Blair to David Cameron, Bono to the Socialist Workers Party, everyone agrees that “development,” the golden calf of our secular age, is A Good Thing. But by the beginning of the 1970s, Teddy was confident enough in his degrowth ideas to try to get them more widely heard. Having discovered a handful of similarly inclined radicals he decided to start a magazine. The Ecologist has changed considerably in its almost 40 years of existence, and will no doubt continue to do so. The first issue is already a historical document. It’s a testimony to how far the green movement has come in the years since. The magazine has crystallized Teddy’s take on the world better than anything else. He remained its editor until 1990, and a glimpse through its back issues is a glimpse through the developing politics of the green movement. It is also a glimpse into how prescient Teddy and his editorial teams were.

Not that things were always rosy. “We thought that first issue would sell around 20,000 copies,” says Teddy. “It sold about 3,000. I couldn’t afford to pay my fellow editor. So he left, and I was on my own.” Things improved, though, and within two years, Teddy and a team he assembled decided to propound their ideas in a more substantial form. The ensuing “Blueprint for Survival” remains one of the most influential tracts in the history of the movement. It sold almost a million copies, influenced politicians, economists and many others, and helped finance The Ecologist for many years to come.

Teddy, meanwhile, and typically, was already moving on. The Blueprint had been so influential that it had led a group of young, keen environmentalists to float the idea of forming a political party; the first in the world to be based on green principles. That party—initially called: “Peoples”—was established in 1973, with its founding document based closely on Teddy’s Blueprint. Within a few years it had changed its name to the Ecology Party. These days, it’s called the Green Party. “We founded it a couple of months before a general election,” recalls Teddy, “and they asked me to contest for a seat.” Choosing his father’s old constituency in Suffolk, he decided that he “needed a gimmick” to get noticed. John Aspinall lent him a camel from his zoo, which he used to highlight the issue of soil erosion in East Anglia. He paraded through the streets with the camel on a leash, bearing the slogan, “No deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith.”

Over the next 10 to 15 years Teddy wandered, literally and metaphorically, as the environmental movement matured around him. In India he worked for the Gandhi Peace Foundation, discovering in the process that “Gandhi had got it completely right. Small, self-regulating societies are the most ecological there can be.” He was employed by the Canadian Ministry of the Environment to review its Third World Aid program. He set up the Committee on the Future of Nuclear Energy, which blew apart the economic case for nuclear power and shook the political establishment. With the then Ecologist editor Nick Hildyard he did the same to the case for large dams in the 1980s.

Meanwhile, he was at work on books of his own—The Great U-Turn, The Way and countless others—all of which hung on the one, central idea that had not changed in Teddy’s thinking for 50 years: that decentralized communitarian societies are the only ones that work, and that humanity gradually needs to revitalize such a way of life if it is to have a future. His adherence to this notion cost him friends and allies. And those wedded to retrograde ideologies often didn’t understand him. Therefore, a wide range of insults were thrown at him over the years. He was called “an extreme right-wing ideologue” (by Dutch Stalinist Eric Krebbers, who disliked Teddy so much that he invented the word “fascistoid” especially for him); a “Bolshevik” (French magazine l’Actuel); a “wacko-communist-liberal” (a call-in viewer of the US C-Span TV network); a “Jacobin terrorist” (US fringe candidate Lyndon Larouche); an “enemy of the state” (President Suharto of Indonesia); a “Gaian-sociobiologist” (Wolfgang Sachs); a “madman” (Professor Lewis Wolpert); and even, allegedly at any rate, “the anti-Christ” (the Catholic Archbishop of Bologna). It’s an impressive list, and anyone who accumulates such a collection of barbs can be sure of two things: firstly, they are having an impact, and secondly, their ideas are hard to fit into easy categories.

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Edward Goldsmith wasn’t easy to pin down. He was full of loathing for industrial society, yet was determined to save it from itself. He believed it’s too late to prevent climate change, yet dedicated years to trying to do just that. Listening to him holding forth on the virtues of “traditional societies” you could take him for what Paul Goodman referred to as a “Neolithic Conservative.” But if you asked him his views on third world debt (cancel it all immediately), direct action (we need more of it), or global capitalism (he was a foremost critic for four decades) you’d recognize the extent to which he advocated for truly Green social transformation.

“It should be obvious that our modern industrial society is not capable of solving the problems that it generates and that today threaten the survival of our species, for to do so would mean adopting measures that are contrary to the short-term interests of those who determine the policies of the mega-states and mega-corporations. What, then, should we do? There seems to be no alternative but to phase out this monstrous aberration and transition toward a society that can sustain itself without annihilating the natural world on which it depends for its sustenance. Political and economic activities that are today completely out of control must be systematically subordinated to social, ecological and moral imperatives if humanity is to have any future on this planet.”

— Edward Goldsmith in 1991 upon receiving the Right Livelihood Award. The latter is an international award to “honor and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today.”