Edward Goldsmith (1928-2009) was a seminal Green activist and theorist as the ferment of “the Sixties” galvanized the development of a distinctive new politics during the 1970s and 1980s. In England, 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, Teddy 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.” The party invited Goldsmith to stand for the Eye 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 now-renamed Ecology Party in the European Parliament elections of 1979.
Acceptance speech upon receiving the Right Livelihood Award
Edward Goldsmith, 1991
The Right Livelihood Award is an international award to “honor and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today.” The prize was established in 1980 by European philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, and is presented annually in early December. An international jury decides the awards in such fields as environmental protection, human rights, sustainable development, health, education, and peace.
Some 25 years ago [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 and set out systematically to phase it out. 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 and that we wrote, two 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.
If industrial society is destructive rather than beneficial, that’s because it is geared to continuous expansion, i.e. to economic development which involves systematically substituting for the biosphere, or the world of living things—the fundamental real world—a totally different organization of matter which we might refer to as the technosphere: the world of human artifacts, or “the surrogate world.” As the technosphere expands so must the biosphere contract and what remains of it become correspondingly degraded. Economic growth is thus biospheric contraction; the two processes are but different sides of the same coin. The trouble is that we did not evolve as part of the technosphere; its proudest creations, such as the motor-car, the television set, the airplane, and the computer may be nice to have, but we can live without them, and indeed have done so for 99% of our tenancy of this planet; but we cannot live without the products of the biosphere—fertile soil, abundant clean water, a favorable and stable climate, etc.
Modern industrial society is unsustainable. Everywhere in the world today croplands are being over-cropped, pasture-lands over-grazed, forests over-logged, wetlands over-drained, ground-waters over-tapped, seas and oceans over-fished … as humanity co-opts for its own use fully 40% of the present Net Primary Product (NPP) of our planet’s terrestrial photosynthesis. At the same time, the living world is being systematically over-burdened with ever growing volumes of wastes of all sorts, including toxic chemicals, heavy metals and radionuclides, while billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are drastically changing the very chemical composition of the atmosphere.
Economic development remains the unquestioned goal of almost every government in the world today. It greatly benefits the elites—the politicians, the international agencies, the bureaucrats, the corportatists—while the costs are paid by the poor and, of course, by the natural world that is degraded and diminished. For example: The plan of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to feed the world is actually another massive development scheme in disguise. It serves the interests of the agro-chemical industry, since it involves massively increasing inputs of fertilizers and pesticides; the interests of the farm machinery industry, since it involves doubling the number of tractors worldwide; those of the livestock industry, since it involves doubling the number of beef cattle; and those of the dam building industry, since it involves a vast increase in the amount of land to be put under perennial irrigation. But all this can only lead to a corresponding increase in the destructive impact of our activities on the land, ultimately reducing its capacity to feed the malnourished. It also means exporting most of the food produced rather than making it available to those who really need it, in order to earn the foreign exchange to pay the interest on the loans contracted to purchase all the inputs.
And so it is with the other problems that confront us—global warming, for instance. Though the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) call for an immediate 60-80% reduction in the emission of the main greenhouse gases, governments continually delay taking effective action in this direction. It thus 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. Ladies and gentleman, we need to create such a society. We need to create it while there is yet time. And it is not our business-as-usual politicians, industrialists or international bureaucrats whom we can count on to do so for us—only we can do it.
