ecology

   The study of the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Ecologists share a sense of environmental awareness with others in the green movement, but they go further and stress the inter-connectedness of all forms of life. They do not see people as being endowed with superior wisdom or with greater rights and wish to see all species treated equally and with respect. Whereas moderate environmentalists – light greens – see the good life as not being markedly different from the one we lead, radical environmentalist or ecologists – dark greens – have a distinctive vision. They are concerned to change society’s present direction, for in their view it currently reinforces values associated with affluence and technology. In Porritt’s words, they wish to ‘overthrow our whole polluting, plundering and materialistic industrial society and, in its place, to create a new economic and social order which will allow human beings to live in harmony with the planet’.

   Further reading: J. Porritt and D. Winner, The Coming of the Greens, Fontana, 1988