Tuesday 21 December 2010

Looking into some green socialist ideas

Over the recent months and weeks i've been reading into a few more green issues. As we all know the capitalist system of the west is crumbling at the knees and the global financial crisis is just the start of this i feel.
I have read and wrote lots about the banking crisis that kicked off this global recession which has affected the west including america and europe the hardest it would seem.

So i thought i'd take a look at how the financial crisis and how the crumbling of capitlism is affecting the world we live in and how i believe that green socialist ideas can help us retain our planet and look towards creating more jobs for parts of the world that struggle to keep up with the leading countries.

Among other such red green groups i have stumbled across the Alliance for green socialism at this address
http://www.greensocialist.org.uk/ags/

I have found some of their thoughts and publications very interesting indeed.

With all the news being dominated by financial matters i thought i'd detail some of the green issues that will have been forgotton about during all the pandimoniam of the money crisis.

It is so easy to loose sight of the world around us at times. Especially when we take it for granted. When money becomes in shorter supply green environmental issues often become the first to get pushed to the back of the queue sadly.
But for example the conservative lead coalition in great britian is looking to sell off a lage amount of woodland to private investors. This is very worrying and no doubt some rich benifactors will come in and build a Centre parc's type complex on many of them.


This again is all for profit and not thinking of the environmental impact of waht building on our old and often stunning woodland.
We are lucky to live in a country with such rich countryside and woodland but we must aim to protect what we have. The invention of industry and expansion of population has created greater need for more housing this is all very well i agree we do need socail housing and a lot more of this but we must not loose sight of the fact we are destroying a lot of our natural environment.

As Caroline Lucas rightly pointed out at a recent New Economics Foundation speech i attended called where has all our money gone. Cleverly titled i think.
SHe raised the point that with the intense growth of the western world and capitialism in the west and our drive for profit has had a direct impact on global warming and the impact we have had on our planet. She states that we will soon run out of food in the west as we consume far too much at the moment and it is simply unsustainable in the current financial climate. With temperatures on the planet rising year on year out it will not be long before the plains in america producing wheat and crops will be unfarmable in years to come. This will become common across large parts of areas of the world where food is grow and farmed. As a result i believe the west will fall into a food shortage. With a steadily increasing world population and a growing need to consume more and more i simply dont see this as the west being able to carry on in the rate it is going.
This is where my socialist theories come in. From reading a lot from Karl Marx in the recent months i realise that he too had some green ideas and that his views on the world contained a care for the planet as well as the appression of the poor.

So my ideas would be to aid the west and to bridge the gap between a failing capitalist society woudl be to introduce green jobs for people who are unemployed and are struggling to find jobs in the present climate. We will of course as global warming doesnt look like going away anytime soon and untill the big pulluting nations in the world start to curb their pollution we will have to adapt to living in a warmer planet with more extreme weather conditions.

As we have seen over recent days in the UK our airports and our trains and transport system simply cant cope when we get a lot of snow. So i propose creating some green jobs for people, if we truely had a government who cared about our country and environment they would invest money into creating green jobs and in greener technologies. This could not only help balance the shift in economic power from the east to west with China pulling away as the worlds leading economy but we could provide good solid jobs for our workers in this country who are currently struggling to find jobs.

I also propose the creation of a green bank. Publically owned of course in the public domain so we the people have the control over it and rich bankers dont come in and take it over and take advantage of it again.
We need a system that is going to work for people firstly and a system that is fair for all. It has been talked about a green bank before but we must be strong with these ideas and push the ideas forward in the direction of government to listen to us. Green socialist ideas can work i feel and even if not fully implimented then we can certainly learn a lot from the ideas of eco-idealists.

I just wondered waht peoples thoughts were as we go forward into the future where they see our planet and its resources going in 10, 100 + years time. I think we need to change our ways dramatically to have any chance of surviving into the future myself. What do you think ?

1 comment:

  1. I like the idea of green socialism. Especially the bank part and creating jobs. If we could only have some people with that thinking in Government!

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