[Update 31st January – see foot of this post for comment by David Taylor]
On Friday 14th January 1972 a bombshell report, ‘A Blueprint for Survival,’ was released onto an increasingly worried world. Produced by the team at The Ecologist, it laid out not just the environmental and social problems, but also offered – the clue is in the name – a blueprint for survival.
Fifty years is a nice round number for reflecting, and this 30 page report [pdf, word.doc] is designed to help with that.
It explains little of the background to the report – the world it entered, who wrote it, how it was received
It doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about what the Blueprint actually says – read it yourself!
It does however talk about what happened next – what the media response, and the political response was [spoilers – scientists warning of trouble ahead will be derided as scare-mongerers, the public’s attention span is short, it’s really hard to ‘capture the moment’ – to do so you need absorptive capacity up the wazoo].
For any Doctor Who fans out there – there’s mention of two classic Pertwee stories.
It then talks a bit about the longer-term, and the birth of the “Ecology Party” (now known as the Green Party), before turning to some of the lessons we might learn around
- Abeyance
- Absorptive Capacity
- Arrogance
Would love to hear people’s comments
Comment received on 31st January 2022 by one of the people behind the excellent “Green History UK” website.
I’ve read your article and it’s got loads of good perspectives. Hopefully we can add that to the site as well.
I trust you won’t mind if I draw your attention to one or two issues where I have a different perspective:-
- The founders of PEOPLE always wrote the name in capitals, not lower case.
- They did not, initially call themselves a ‘political party’. If you look at the early PEOPLE literature you will see that they were always just called ‘PEOPLE’. On some occasions (as on the material advertising the Jigsaw Conference) they referred to themselves as a ‘movement’. . Lesley W had researched the issue and found that you didn’t have to be a ‘party’ to contest an election, so they weren’t. It was others, particularly journalists, who referred to them as a ‘party’, because they contested elections. This later led to PEOPLE referring to themselves as both a ‘movement’ and a ‘party’.
- In that it intended to contest elections Movement for Survival was as much a ‘party’ as PEOPLE. The two movements had similar strategies. This isn’t surprising as PEOPLE arose directly from Survival. The similarity wasn’t just because PEOPLE took over Movement’s box of contacts. The PEOPLE founders were also supporters of Movement and the Whittakers, in particular, had been meeting with Teddy throughout 1972. Teddy told me back then how delighted he was to have found a group of professional people (estate agent, solicitors) to take over Movement. There was no formal handover but the reality was that PEOPLE grew directly out of Movement, and took it over. There is a widespread misconception (reinforced by repetition) that the modern Green Party began when PEOPLE was publicly launched in February 1973. This ‘fact’ was one of the answers in a recent Mastermind quiz. The truth is that Survival’s launch, in the January edition of the Ecologist magazine, marked the actual beginning of the global movement of green parties.
- You describe Goldsmith as ‘authoritarian’. During his time he was labelled many things -all of them wrong really. There were no good labels for what he was espousing. This is understandable as he was originating a new political philosophy and it didn’t fit comfortably into any of the existing categories. You describe Blueprint as promoting ‘radical de-centralisation’. I think this phrase better describes Teddy’s outlook. He was, after all, a big admirer of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin…
Thank you for what you’re doing. We need this history!
Very best,
David (Taylor)