The world's first green party was born fighting a dam in Tasmania
In March 1972 campaigners in Australia founded the United Tasmania Group to stop logging and a dam that would damage Lake Pedder. It won only about three percent in state elections, yet it inspired green parties worldwide. Within months New Zealand and Britain had launched national environmental parties of their own.
Green politics, sometimes called ecopolitics, aims for an ecologically sustainable society, usually alongside nonviolence, social justice and grassroots democracy. Its platforms generally sit on the left and overlap with feminist, peace and conservation movements. The political use of green comes from die Grünen, the German party formed in the late 1970s. Many adherents see the outlook as a wider worldview drawing on sources as varied as indigenous values, Baruch Spinoza and Jakob von Uexküll, with an emphasis on thinking seven generations ahead.
Worries about damaging nature are ancient; writers in both Rome and China grumbled about foul air, dirty water and noise. The philosophical roots of environmentalism run through Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau, and organised movements arose in late nineteenth-century Europe and America in reaction to industrial expansion. The Sierra Club, started in San Francisco in 1892, was one early conservation forerunner. In the 1970s these strands combined with ecology, pacifism and forms of libertarian socialism into a distinct political philosophy.
Electoral breakthroughs followed quickly. In June 1970 a Dutch group called the Kabouters, offshoots of the Provo movement, won 5 of the 45 seats on Amsterdam's council with proposals they called Green Plans. The Values Party, launched at Victoria University of Wellington in May 1972, was the first green party to contest parliamentary seats nationwide, and Britain's PEOPLE followed that November as Europe's first.
The German Greens are often wrongly assumed to have been Europe's first nationally elected green party, because they drew the most attention. They began as a loose coalition of civic groups, contested the 1979 European elections and their first federal election in 1980, and set out four founding principles. In Canada, anti-nuclear candidates inspired by Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful ran in 1980 as the Small Party, and several of them helped found the national Green Party of Canada in 1983.
Source: Green politics
