Making the Green one red: environmental politics.

IN THE TWO hundred years since the French Revolution, conservatives have been waging a rearguard struggle in defense of freedom against the forces of the radical Left.

It was the events in France that introduced "revolution" into our political vocabulary as a term meaning the absolute break with an existing order and the establishment of a radically new one: a government of Virtue to replace the despotism of Tradition, a religion of Reason to replace religions of Faith, the true order of Nature to replace the artificial system of Society. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the French Revolution also introduced the concept and practice of political terror. For behind the radical impulse is a consciousness alien to all that is human, rejecting the historically given needs and desires of ordinary people--which is why the radical effort to maintain its order always requires radical forces. For a hundred years this political combat has taken the form of an international civil war instigated by the Marxist heirs of Robespierre and Saint-Just against the democratic market societies of the West.

The radical differs from the reformer who seeks only to right particular wrongs; the radical seeks to annihilate the social order itself. His rebellion, in the words of Marx, is "not against any wrong in particular but against wrong as such." It is this radical idea that produces the radical's alienation from humanity.

What can justify the nihilism of the revolutionary agenda? Only a vision of the existing order as totally unjustified, unnatural, destructive. On the eve of Lenin's conquest of power, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg summarized this vision of a radical apocalypse in the slogan "socialism or barbarism"--if mankind did not choose the socialist future, civilization would be destroyed by capitalist barbarism and its imperialist wars.

The apocalyptic claim is the cornerstone of radical politics. If the cause is absolute, everything is permitted, and the real work of revolution can--and must--be carried out with no look back. Thus, in the name of everlasting peace, Marxists wage permanent revolutionary war; in the name of a final human liberation, they enslave entire nations; in the name of ultimate justice, they commit unparalleled crimes.

For more than seventy years this served to justify the destruction of the existing societies behind the iron curtain and to legitimize the institution of the Soviet future. But those seventy years have made Rosa Luxemburg's claim grotesque. Today--from Estonia to Armenia, from Alexanderplatz to Tianamen Square--the sea of humanity liberated by Marxism itself proclaims: Socialism is barbarism.

Even as its own inhumanity and inefficiency consume revolutionary socialism in the East, however, a specter can be seen rising from its ashes in the West. The colors are no longer red but green, the accents are those of Malthus rather than Marx, but the missionary project is remarkably intact. The planet is still threatened, the present is still condemned, redemption through radical politics still presses. In environmentalism radicals have found a new paradigm for the paradigm lost.

Thus, the official program of France's Green Party echoes Rosa Luxemberg's apocalyptic cry: "The future will be green or will not be at all." The blunt expression of the founder of American "social ecology," Murray Bookchin, exhibits the distinctive accents of the totalitarian voice: "We can't heal the environment without remaking society."

The old radical Adam is back. "From all the knowledge we now have about environmental issues," writes Jonathon Porritt, a spokesman for Britain's Ecology Party and director of Friends of the Earth, "the inevitable conclusion is that our way of life cannot be sustained . . . we cannot go on living as we do now." When he hears politicians say that they care for the environment and thus want to achieve "sustainable growth," it leaves him "spitting with rage." We cannot continue "with [our] same material living standard and at the same time be warriors on behalf of the planet."

Thus radical ecology leads to the familiar threat. "We in the West have the standard of living we do only because we are so good at stripping the Earth of its resources and oppressing the rest of the world's people in order to maintain that wealth." To achieve ecological balance means "progressively narrowing the gap to reduce the differences between the Earth's wealthiest and poorest inhabitants," until there are "more or less equal shares for all people."

Karl Marx described this prescription aptly 150 years ago:

Primitive Communism is only the

culmination of . . . every and leveling down

. . . How little this abolition of private

property represents a genuine

appropriation is shown by [its] abstract

negation of the whole world of culture and

civilization, and [its] regression to the

unnatural simplicity of the poor, rough man

without wants, who has not only not

surpassed private property but has not yet

even attained to it.

Eco-socialism is barbarism.

David Brower, the founder of Porritt's organization, departed some years ago to create the even more left-wing Earth Island Institute in Berkeley. Last June, Brower took his place alongside Daniel Ortega as co-sponsor of the Fourth Biennial meeting of the International Congress on the Hope and Fate of the Earth in Managua. One thousand delegates from more than seventy nations met to denounce the United States and the other imperialist predators of the free world, and to launch a new movement of "solidarity environmentalism." According to a report in Brower's: "The consensus at the Congress was that |solidarity environmentalism' is the only kind that makes sense. . . . Would George Bush and Margaret Thatcher be able to call themselves environmentalists if the effort to protect the ozone layer and stop global warming was linked to the Third World movement's demands for a new, more equitable international economic system, an end to the Third World debt, and curbs on the free action of multinational corporations?"

In Managua the political symbolism of the Green united front was all in place: Swedish social democracy, British Eco-socialism, Third World Marxism-Leninism, and American Auto-Nihilism. This development reflects the fact that the Green movement has grown to its present dimensions out of the crisis of the Left--in particular the necessity of establishing a face-saving distance from the catastrophe of Marxist liberation in the socialist bloc. To avoid the taint of the socialist past, the Green parties of Europe constantly emphasize that their movement is "neither Left nor Right," and distinguish the "politics of ecology" from the "politics of industrialism" (i.e., of economic growth), which characterizes both capitalist and socialist societies. But from a historical perspective, it would be more accurate to say that the Green movement is a phenomenon of both Left and Right, uniting the two traditions of radical totalitarian revolt against liberal order in the twentieth century: Communism and fascism.

The fascist roots of the Green movement are well known. National Socialists were naturalists long before the post-Khruschev Left discovered ecology, and the Nazis have been justly described as "the first radical environmentalists in charge of a state." Indeed the enthronement of biological imperatives, of the virtues of blood and soil and the primitive communities of the Volk, the pagan rejection of the Judaeo-Christian God, and the radical anti-humanism featured in the philosophy of the Greens are more obviously derivative of fascist than Marxist political traditions. But despite tensions between the deep ecologists of the environmental right wing and the eco-socialists of its left wing, they are indissolubly joined in the embrace of a single illusion: the gnostic idea that humanity has been alienated from its natural self and that its redemption can be achieved by political means; the idea that implies a declaration of war by a chosen few against the historical existence of all.

The liberation of humanity in the sense of a restoration of its natural self is a myth. The reality is an assault on humanity as we know it. What motivates radicals is not compassion for the lost soul of mankind, but the hatred of human beings as they are.

Ironically, it is this antagonism to common humanity that, through the cunning of history, has proved to be the radicals' current undoing. In the name of injustice done to the proletariat, Marxists were able to carry out their works of destruction. But once in power, Marxism--like fascism--exploited, oppressed, and ruined the masses it claimed to liberate. The radical enterprise succumbed to the gravitational pull of human nature, which even massive doses of repression could not undo. The very victims in whose name its assault was carried out have now rejected it, so Marxism can no longer invoke their suffering to justify its destructive agendas. This is the real crisis of the radical Left--and environmentalism is its solution.

This is the truly new element in the Green revolution: a constituency--nature --that cannot speak for itself. The conflict between vanguard and victim that has plagued generations of the Left has been thus eliminated. What remains is the hubris of the radical remnant, the self-chosen saviors for whom the human condition is not a reality we must come to terms with, but material which we must approach as gods and redeemers to subdue and transform.

What then is the conservative response to the environmental crisis and the radical threat? Conservatism is an anti-gnostic, anti-revolutionary attitude that accepts the fallen, unequal, alienated state of mankind and seeks to preserve the conditions of culture and freedom that human enterprise and moral imagination have created. The fact that conservatives recognize and accept the problematic nature of human existence does not mean that they embrace a passive attitude toward the problems of human societies. On the contrary, their authentic concern about the fate and welfare of real human beings is attested by their two hundred year struggle in defense of freedom. But now that the Left lies defeated on the plain of battle, they must re-emphasize the active side of the conservative project, accepting their responsibility as captains of the ship of state. For, as Burke admonished: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

CONSERVATIVES SHOULD should not surrender the defense of the environment to the Left, any more than we should surrender the defense of the Republic or of human rights to their historic enemies. Conservatives must not be blindly reactionary, conceiving their role merely as a negative force--a check on radical hubris. We should not be afraid of the costs necessary to defend the environment, as a foundation of our communal health and human heritage. Not all growth is good. Metastasis is growth too. Nor is every event that calls itself a revolution bad. Two hundred years ago, conservatives took the lead in the American revolution to preserve their rights as Englishmen; today, they should take the lead in the reforms necessary to preserve the environment as well.

Mr. Horowitz is co-director of the Second Thoughts Project of the National Forum Foundation.