Bright green environmentalism is an environmental philosophy and movement that emphasizes the use of advanced technology, social innovation, eco-innovation, and sustainable design
to address environmental challenges. This approach contrasts with more
traditional forms of environmentalism that may advocate for reduced
consumption or a return to simpler lifestyles.
Origin and evolution of bright green thinking
The term bright green, coined in 2003 by writer Alex Steffen, refers to the fast-growing new wing of environmentalism, distinct from traditional forms.
Bright green environmentalism aims to provide prosperity in an
ecologically sustainable way through the use of new technologies and
improved design.
Proponents promote and advocate for green energy, electric vehicles, efficient manufacturing systems, bio and nanotechnologies, ubiquitous computing, dense urban settlements, closed loop materials cycles and sustainable product designs. One-planet living is a commonly used phrase. Their principal focus is on the idea that through a combination of well-built communities, new technologies and sustainable living practices, the quality of life can actually be improved even while ecological footprints shrink.
Around the middle of the century
we'll see global population peak at something like 9 billion people, all
of whom will want to live with a reasonable amount of prosperity, and
many of whom will want, at the very least, a European lifestyle. They
will see escaping poverty as their nonnegotiable right, but to deliver
that prosperity at our current levels of efficiency and resource use
would destroy the planet many times over. We need to invent a new model
of prosperity, one that lets billions have the comfort, security, and
opportunities they want at the level of impact the planet can afford. We
can't do that without embracing technology and better design.
The term bright green has been used with increased frequency
due to the promulgation of these ideas through the Internet and recent
coverage by some traditional media.
Dark greens, light greens and bright greens
Alex Steffen describes contemporary environmentalists as being split into three groups, dark, light, and bright greens.
Light Green
Light greens see protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. They fall into the transformational activist
end of the spectrum, but light greens do not emphasize environmentalism
as a distinct political ideology, or even seek fundamental political reform. Instead, they often focus on environmentalism as a lifestyle choice. The motto "Green is the new black" sums up this way of thinking, for many. This is different from the term lite green, which some environmentalists use to describe products or practices they believe are greenwashing, those products and practices which pretend to achieve more change than they actually do (if any).
In The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate
notes that there are typically significant divisions within
environmental theory. He identifies one group as “light Greens” or
“environmentalists,” who view environmental protection primarily as a
personal responsibility. The other group, termed “dark Greens” or “deep
ecologists,” believes that environmental issues are fundamentally tied
to industrialized civilization and advocate for radical political
changes. This distinction can be summarized as “Know Technology” versus
“No Technology” (Suresh Frederick in Ecocriticism: Paradigms and Praxis).
Bright Green
More recently, bright greens emerged as a group of
environmentalists who believe that radical changes are needed in the
economic and political operation of society in order to make it
sustainable, but that better designs, new technologies and more widely
distributed social innovations are the means to make those changes—and
that society can neither stop nor protest its way to sustainability. As Ross Robertson writes,
[B]right
green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we
need to overcome than the "tools, models, and ideas" that already exist
for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for
the energizing confidence of constructive solutions.
The book was translated into several languages, and in short order "sold a million copies."
According to a 2021 essay in The New York Times, "In the 19th-century United States, only Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in its first years than 'Looking Backward.'" Bellamy's book influenced many intellectuals, and appears by title in many socialist
writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that
created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement."
In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. Owing to its commitment to the nationalization
of private property and the desire to avoid use of the term
"socialism," this political movement came to be known as Nationalism
(not to be confused with the political ideology of nationalism). The novel also inspired several utopian communities.
Synopsis
Bellamy's time travel novel tells the story of a hero figure named Julian West, a young American who, at the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the same location (Boston, Massachusetts), but in a totally changed world: It is the year 2000, and while he was sleeping, the United States has been transformed into a socialist utopia.
The remainder of the book outlines Bellamy's thoughts about improving
the future. The major themes include problems associated with capitalism,
a proposed socialist solution of a nationalization of all industry, and
the use of an "industrial army" to organize production and
distribution, as well as how to ensure free cultural production under
such conditions.
The young man is awoken to a guide, Doctor Leete, who shows him
around and explains all the advances of this new age, including
drastically reduced working hours for people performing menial jobs and
almost instantaneous, internet-like delivery of goods. Everyone retires
with full benefits at age 45, and may eat in any of the public kitchens
(realized as factory-kitchens
in the 1920s–30s in the USSR). The productive capacity of the United
States is nationally owned, and the goods of society are equally
distributed to its citizens. A considerable portion of the book is
dialogue between Leete and West wherein West expresses his confusion
about how the future society works and Leete explains the answers using
various methods, such as metaphors or direct comparisons with
19th-century society.
Although Bellamy's novel did not discuss technology or the economy in detail, commentators frequently compare Looking Backward with actual economic and technological developments.
For example, Julian West is taken to a store which (with its
descriptions of cutting out the middleman to cut down on waste in a
similar way to the consumers' cooperatives of his own day based on the Rochdale Principles of 1844) somewhat resembles a modern warehouse club
like BJ's, Costco, or Sam's Club. He additionally introduces a concept
of "credit" cards in chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25, and 26, but these
actually function like modern debit cards.
All citizens receive an equal amount of "credit." Those with more
difficult, specialized, dangerous, or unpleasant jobs work fewer hours.
Bellamy also predicts both sermons and music being available in the home
through cable "telephone" (already demonstrated but commercialized only in 1890 as Théâtrophone in France).
Bellamy's ideas somewhat reflect classical Marxism. In chapter 19, for example, he has the new legal system explained. Most civil suits have ended in socialism, while crime has become a medical issue. The idea of atavism,
then current, is employed to explain crimes not related to inequality
(which Bellamy thinks will vanish with socialism). Remaining criminals
are medically treated. One professional judge presides, appointing two
colleagues to state the prosecution and defense cases. If all do not
agree on the verdict, then it must be tried again. Chapters 15 and 16
have an explanation of how free, independent public art and news outlets
could be provided in a more libertarian socialist system. In one case, Bellamy even writes, "the nation is the sole employer and capitalist."
Publication history
The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873–1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath. Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms—monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts—began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate. The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.
Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), a relatively unknown New England-born novelist with a history of concern with social issues, began to conceive of writing an impactful work of visionary fiction shaping the outlines of a utopian
future, in which production and society were ordered for the smooth
production and distribution of commodities to a regimented labor force.
In this he was not alone—between 1860 and 1887, no fewer than 11 such
works of fiction were produced in the United States by various authors
dealing fundamentally with the questions of economic and social
organization.
Bellamy's book, gradually planned throughout the 1880s, was completed in 1887 and taken to Boston publisher Benjamin Ticknor, who published a first edition of the novel in January 1888.
Initial sales of the book were modest and uninspiring, but the book did
find a readership in the Boston area, including enthusiastic reviews by
future Bellamyites Cyrus Field Willard of the Boston Globe and Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald.
Shortly after publication, Ticknor's publishing enterprise, Ticknor and Company, was purchased by the larger Boston publisher, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and new publishing plates were created for the book.
Certain "slight emendations" were made to the text by Bellamy for this
second edition, released by Houghton Mifflin in September 1889.
In its second release, Bellamy's futuristic novel met with
enormous popular success, with more than 400,000 copies sold in the
United States alone by the time Bellamy's follow-up novel, Equality, was published in 1897. Sales topped 532,000 in the US by the middle of 1939. The book gained an extensive readership in Great Britain, as well, with more than 235,000 copies sold there between its first release in 1890 and 1935.
The Bellamy Library of Fact and Fiction', by William
Reeves, a radical London publisher, printer and bookseller was a
systematic effort to organize this literature. The Bellamy Library
codified series of texts designed to make political works, defined by
their radical content and popular appeal, both intellectually and
financially accessible to working-class activists and lower-
middle-class radicals. It was especially popular among working men's clubs.
The first version of the novel published in China, heavily edited for the tastes of Chinese readers, was titled Huitou kan jilüe (回頭看記略). This text was later retitled Bainian Yi Jiao (百年一覺 ), or "A Sleep of 100 Years" and in 1891–1892 this version was serialized in Wanguo gongbao;
the organization Guangxuehui (廣學會; Society for Promoting Education)
published these pieces in a book format. This first translation, the
first piece of science fiction from a Western country published in Qing dynasty China, was done in an abridged format by Timothy Richard. The novel was again serialized in China in 1898, in Zhongguo guanyin baihua bao (中國官音白話報); and in 1904, under the title Huitou kan (Looking Backward), within Xiuxiang xiaoshuo (繡像小說; Illustrated Fiction).
The book remains in print in multiple editions, with one
publisher alone having reissued the title in a printing of 100,000
copies in 1945.
Precursors
Though Bellamy tended to stress the independence of his work, Looking Backward shares relationships and resemblances with several earlier works—most notably the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John Macnie's The Diothas (1883), Laurence Gronlund's The Co-operative Commonwealth (1884), and August Bebel's Woman in the Past, Present, and Future (1886). For example, in The True Author of Looking Backward (1890) J. B. Shipley argued that Bellamy's novel was a repeat of Bebel's arguments, while literary critic R. L. Shurter went so far as to argue that "Looking Backward is actually a fictionalized version of The Co-operative Commonwealth and little more". However, Bellamy's book also bears resemblances to the early socialist theorists or 'utopian socialists' Etienne Cabet, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Henri Saint-Simon, as well as to the 'Associationism' of Albert Brisbane, whom Bellamy had met in the 1870s.
In 1897, Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality,
dealing with women's rights, education, and many other issues. Bellamy
wrote the sequel to elaborate and clarify many of the ideas merely
touched upon in Looking Backward.
The success of Looking Backward provoked a spate of sequels, parodies, satires, dystopian, and 'anti-utopian' responses. A partial list of these follows.
The result was a "battle of the books" that lasted through the rest of
the 19th century and into the 20th. The back-and-forth nature of the
debate is illustrated by the subtitle of Geissler's 1891 Looking Beyond, which is "A Sequel to 'Looking Backward' by Edward Bellamy and an Answer to 'Looking Forward' by Richard Michaelis".
The book was translated into Bulgarian in 1892. Bellamy personally approved a request by Bulgarian author Iliya Yovchev to make an "adapted translation" based on the realities of Bulgarian social order. The resulting work, titled The Present as Seen by Our Descendants And a Glimpse at the Progress of the Future
("Настоящето, разгледано от потомството ни и надничане в напредъка на
бъдещето"), generally followed the same plot. The events in Yovchev's
version take place in an environmentally friendlySofia
and describe the country's unique path of adapting to the new social
order. It is considered by local critics to be the first Bulgarian
utopian work.
The book also influenced activists in Britain. Scientist Alfred Russel Wallace credited Looking Backward for his conversion to socialism. Politician Alfred Salter cited Looking Backward as an influence on his political thought.
The Russian translation of Looking Backward was banned by the Tsarist Russian censors.
In the 1930s, there was a revival of interest in Looking Backward.
Several groups were formed to promote the book's ideas. The largest was
Edward Bellamy Association of New York; its honorary members included John Dewey, Heywood Broun and Roger N. Baldwin. Arthur Ernest Morgan, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, also admired the book and wrote the first biography of Bellamy.
Despite never mentioning the book by name in any of his works, Looking Backward postulated a socialist-fueled utopia that "confounded" Orwell, and his Nineteen Eighty-Four can be seen as a dystopian counterpoint to the utopian genre, of which Looking Backward was a progenitor.Orwell wrote of Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism that "these optimistic forecasts make rather painful reading."
Looking Backward was rewritten in 1974 by American socialist science fiction writer Mack Reynolds as Looking Backward from the Year 2000. Matthew Kapell, a historian and anthropologist, examined this re-writing in his essay, "Mack Reynolds' Avoidance of his own Eighteenth Brumaire: A Note of Caution for Would-Be Utopians".
In 1984, Herbert Knapp and Mary Knapp's Red, White and Blue Paradise: The American Canal Zone in Panama appeared. The book was in part a memoir of their careers teaching at fabled Balboa High School, but also a re-interpretation of the Canal Zone as a creature of turn-of-the-century Progressivism, a workers' paradise. The Knapps used Bellamy's Looking Backward as their heuristic model for understanding Progressive ideology as it shaped the Canal Zone.
A one-act play, Bellamy's Musical Telephone, was written by Roger Lee Hall and premiered at Emerson College in Boston in 1988 on the centennial year of the novel's publication. It was released as a DVD titled The Musical Telephone.
The first 21st-century work based on Bellamy's novel was written in 2020 by American political scientist and utopian socialist William P. Stodden, titled The Practical Effects of Time Travel: A Memoir.
The book, which differs significantly from the original, though follows
a similar narrative arc, details a female protagonist's journey, via
time machine, to a future where need has been eliminated via a strong Universal Basic Income and National Service Program,
while cooperation has replaced competition. The book also discusses a
strong influence of technology and robotics in freeing humans from
grueling manual labor. The book focused heavily on moral and ethical theory and ethical socialism, rather than materialism, as the ideological foundation of the utopian society.
Looking Backward from the Tricentennial: A Timely Tale of Nonviolent Revolution
was a post-pandemic retelling of Bellamy's novel. While keeping the
main characters and some details of the original, it portrayed Julian
West as a formerly incarcerated Black man waking up (via cryonics) in 2076. The utopian future was the result of a radical revolution of values based on the lessons of Martin Luther King,
which were combined with game theory to stage a nonviolent revolution
in the ballot box. The American Union Jobs Program, a form of unconditional basic income, was implemented using monetary reform,
unlocking a path to addressing King's triple evils of poverty, racism,
and militarism. A variety of tutors school Julian in the details of
monetary theory, the principles of nonviolence, the workings of the people's legislative assembly which has crowdsourced Congress, and the application of game theory
to electoral politics. The novel concludes with Julian West time
traveling back to 2023, hoping to implement the new paradigm and prevent
the United States from undergoing a civil war.
