This means a course which generically, at the very least, can be described as green, a choice, as the Scottish Greens have bluntly put it, of green or bust. This is a much larger choice than one we might make, for example, between staying with the Democrats or joining the Green Party, between favoring a particular environmental policy or not, or between tofu and ribeye. It is the choice of rejecting the internal logic of a technocratic system in favor of judging things by their effects on justice, democracy, community and ecology. And it is the choice of opposing repressive principles, most particularly those of the Darwinian marketplace. Normal and natural as economic exchange may be, it makes as much sense to organize human community around it as it would to deliberately construct a society obsessed with eating, sleeping, or bowel movements.
Life is simply more complicated, and wonderful, than that.
Rebellion of ordinary virtue One striking thing about the new green activists is how normal they are. If you hang around radical causes and movements, you become accustomed to a remarkable collection of eccentrics, malcontents, geniuses, saints, hustlers, peripatetic joiners, hyperactive missionaries, major and minor prophets, not to mention police informers, who lend character, if not a majority, to these efforts. Increasingly, ordinary and intrinsically non-political people are feeling compelled to leave what they are doing and in order to save what they value most. There is, I think, something heroic about this. Conrad said that the hero, like the coward, is someone who, for one brief moment, does something out of the ordinary.