The Green Party have undergone a political renaissance in recent years, culminating in July with their best ever general election result in history, securing four seats in Parliament, which they took from both major parties, and coming in second place in seats across the nation. So with more attention than ever being given to this group, what is it that green thinking actually means, and what could we expect from our newest representatives?
Green Parties, Green Future is an extensive analysis of the state of the world’s green movements in various countries across the globe. Dealing with individual parties, the development of green thinking, ecologism and what makes a green party in-keeping with global green tenets, the book asks where green representatives have come from, what has been achieved and where these movements might go in the future. The book then continues into a summary of one hundred active green parties across the globe, documenting how the movements have developed so rapidly in the past few decades.
This book is great for anyone who wants to begin to explore green politics and political thinking. Given the surge in Green Party support in the General Election, a new level of attention is being paid to our own green politicians, and this book does a good job at exploring green political thought and explaining it well. For many people, green parties are often written off as single-issue (namely the environment) parties, whilst this exposes the reality that they’re not, instead an entire approach centred around environmental preservation which seeks to reform almost every aspect of our livelihoods for a different outlook on the world.
I also appreciated the time taken to explore green history, and common structures between international green groups, particularly in their aims for gender-balanced representation. I was unaware before reading this that gender-balanced leadership was a wider effort, and believed our own leadership in the form of Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay was a unique party structure. But knowing that issues such as this, feminism, LGBTQ+ acceptance and more are promoted at global level in almost all of their groups was exciting to read, as a new approach that is often ignored by other parties.
However, this book did have its fair share of flaws and issues. Firstly, whilst not an issue of the book itself, being published in 2015 it is considerably out of date, which may be a bit of a barrier when picking this book up, especially when in the extensive section on the state of green parties around the world. Unsurprisingly, their states have altered slightly in the past nine years, which is easy enough to overlook but makes the section more obsolete as time passes. This section wasn’t a particularly enjoyable one at that. 43% of this book is dedicated to going through a hundred green parties, which wasn’t entertaining at all, given that many of these parties were being spoken about for the first time.
What’s more, for a political ideology that appears to be advocating for less eurocentrism and western dominance, this section was very Eurocentric. Whilst I appreciate that the majority of the world’s more successful parties are the European ones, and that modern green thinking and organisation originated from inside Europe, the balance of coverage is off. For perspective, the time it took for me to read the section on the green parties of the entirety of Africa and the Americas, I spent the same amount of time getting approximately halfway through that of Europe, with extensive detailing that simply wasn’t matched for other locations. There may not be as much to say for smaller parties, but it does somewhat contradict, ironically, green thinking the book advocates and documents.
Finally, if you’re looking for light reading this book definitely isn’t it. Unless you’re intimately familiar with green political thinking already, having a dictionary or Google by your side would definitely make life easier. For example, one section of this book deals with environmentalism versus ecologism as schools of thought, and why one is approved by green thinkers and the other isn’t extensive enough. I don’t mean to presume the attitudes of lay readers, but I’m fairly confident that most would not be able to confidently say which is which, and explaining the two so closely and to such depth can easily be confusing. The language used isn’t particularly accessible which acts as a barrier to understanding, particularly if learning about international green movements for the first time.
Green Parties, Green Future makes a bold attempt at cataloguing the rise of green parties across the world and how their thinking differs from many other groups with political representation. Whilst a good way to explore their development, it’s not a book that many would enjoy reading casually, unless you find yourself particularly interested in green political thinking already. I would like to see an updated and more accessible version, but in its current form is a challenge to get into.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Green Parties, Green Future (ISBN: 978-0-7453-3339-7) was published in 2015
