For a take on this, see Larry Elliot (Economics Editor) in today's Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1939026,00.html
Jerome is pretty snippy about this tradition (generally and in his comment above) but I think it's clear that the evidence is only growing that most of our "quality of life" gains (not to mention gains in agricultural productivity) have come out of the ground in the form of oil/coal/gas. If we are serious about the problems (peak oil and CO2) then we need to at least engage with alternative ways of looking at human development, or we'll never be able to address the problems in a proper manner.
That would be easier to argue than the end of the Black Death. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
It was the merchants who drove the industrial revolution. And it's still the merchants who are setting the agenda today. Only now they're a little more powerful than they used to be.
Capitalism is just another word for merchant-culture. Everyone trades, everyone tries to get rich, and - er - that's it.
I just don't see the significance of the little ice age, in the mediterranean basin it didn't have a crippling economic effect. If you're thinking about the Maunder Minimum, it coincided with the reign of Le Roi Soleil, so France was obviously unaffected. And "the end of the little ice age" seems to have happened around 1850?
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling occurring after a warmer era known as the Medieval climate optimum. Climatologists and historians find it difficult to agree on either the start or end dates of this period. Some confine the Little Ice Age to 1550-1850, lasting approximately from the 14th to the mid-19th centuries while others prefer a span from the 13th to 17th centuries. It is generally agreed that there were three minima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850, each separated by slight warming intervals.
But the point remains that the traditional left ideologies, including social democracy, were wedded to an industrial idea of progress. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
I can't really agree here. The trouble with environmental destruction is that not only does it hit the demos indirectly, sometimes it doesn't hit them. The direct sufferers are oftentimes non-members of the voting body. (Be them animals, plants, foreigner humans, or future children.) That is, democracy is necessary, but not enough. Also, this partly explains why:
the traditional left ideologies, including social democracy, were wedded to an industrial idea of progress.
What the industrial idea of progress shares with the Enlightement view of society (the basis of not only traditional left ideologies but liberalism and nationalism too) is seeing people exist in a vacuum, not embedded in a biosphere with several loopbacks and many other inhabitants. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
The social democratic kind has a long tradition of being in government and indeed working to further the rights and interests of workers and the low/middle classes. The communist kind has only ever been in power (on its own) in what turned out to be pretty nasty dictatorships with consistently horrible track records with respect to the commons. In countries with strogn social democratic traditions (most of Europe), they have become a effective 'reality check' (for better of for worse, YMMV) for the government left if it tended to go too rightist.
What I am saying is that the environmental movement has the same kind of split, and the the existence of the "hard left" kind is used by the right to deconsider environmentalism, just like the existence of the hard left is used to deconsider the left overall, even if its influence in the West is mostly benign and useful (as opposed to its role solo in government, where it has historically been not so benign). In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
What about that Indian state? Or Nepal before the royal coup? And re my original point, can all those pretty nasty dictatorships be treated as independent from each other (e.g. hasn't the devolution of the Soviet Union into Stalinism not had an effect on the movements that came to power later elsewhere) and from circumstances (like: war and intervention that begat a war mentality, as Migeru emphasized a couple of times)?
At any rate, the distinction you made is not between the left and non-left, but inside the left.
What I am saying is that the environmental movement has the same kind of split
If you check my comment on the German Greens' origin, you'll see that the picture is more complex. It was the power-conscious ex-violent-radicals who brought it towards the center, while those more radical on environmental issues were more peaceful (in fact many of them peace movement activists) and were pushed to the backbenches. The scale from SUV arsonist to fuel tax specialist (which may appear to you) is not sufficient to describe the different shades and radicalism of Greens, they are a bit different bunch from traditional hard leftists.
the existence of the "hard left" kind is used by the right to deconsider environmentalism
The right uses anything to deconsider leftist ideas, including lies, including about leftists and including about hard leftists, and sometimes it appears centrists and centre-leftists are buying into right-wing rhetoric when protesting their difference. This should be clear to you as per your own experience in debates at dKos (where for some by now you must count as looney-left both on the energy tax and relationship with Muslims). This is not to say that there are no radical environmentalists who say silly things (of course there are), but about taking the Right's judgements not unseriously enough. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
