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is that people would travel less. Arne Naess in his 1987 Schumacher
Lecture referred to the principle of limited mobility , and William
Ophuls, too, believes that personal mobility would be limited in such a
society (1977, p. 167). In the first place, this is because greens consider
present travel practices to be wasteful of resources. The ecological foot-
print associated with air travel is an increasing worry, even for main-
stream politics, as the climate change emissions associated with air
travel increase at a faster rate than any other sector of the economy.
Second, and more importantly, greens argue for reduced mobility as
a part of their hopes for generating supportive, satisfying relationships
in their decentralized, self-reliant communities. From this point of view
travel involves dislocation of the ties that hold such communities
together, and so endangers the emergence of the sense of loyalty and
involvement (Porritt, 1984a, p. 166) that, for greens, will be one of the
prime benefits of decentralized communitarian life. The sustainable
society is substantially about living in place and developing an intim-
acy with it and the people who live there; travel, on this reading, is too
expansive and too centrifugal an occupation.
The sustainable society 85
Work
Paul Ekins refers to a reconceptualisation of the nature and value of
work as one of the principal pillars of the green economic and social
framework (1986, p. 97), and it is certainly true that ecologism can be
marked off from most other modern political ideologies by its attitude
to the subject. Political ecologists have a specific view on the value of
work and they also question the dominant tendency to associate work
with paid employment. Such an association can lead us to believe that if
a person is not in paid employment then they are not working. This, for
greens, is simply untrue, and their renegotiation of the meaning of work
leads them to suggest ways of freeing it from what they see as restric-
tions founded on the modern (and archaic) sense that work is just paid
employment. This will become clearer shortly, but first a word needs to
be said about how greens value work itself.
One of the most common scenarios for advanced industrial societies
in this context is the workless future. This is a familiar story one that
begins in automated car factories and suggests that technological
advances will eventually enable us to enjoy more or less labourless pro-
duction across vast swathes of the industrial process. In this future the
only problem would be how best to use the increased leisure time cre-
ated by clean and automated production. Greens have peered into this
future and they do not like what they see.
First, they will claim that it is premised upon rates of consumption
and production that are called into question by the limits to growth
thesis. Second, to the extent that this future is already with us, political
ecologists will object to the unemployment that automated production
appears to cause, and they typically reject claims that other industries
(service, sunrise ) will take up the employment slack caused by indus-
trial reconversion. Third, such a future (given the present general
antipathy to redistribution) would most likely produce a society split
between the highly paid monitors of machinery and the recipients of
social security payments pitched at a level designed to discourage indo-
lence. Finally, greens look at the burgeoning leisure industry and see its
consumer-oriented, environmentally damaging, industrialized and dis-
ciplined nature as a threat to the self-reliant, productive practices that
the green Good Life holds out for us.
But beyond even all this, greens will be sceptical (at the very least) of
the workless future because they believe work is a good thing. In this
respect they are part of a tradition which has it that work is a noble
occupation, that it uplifts the spirit and helps create and reproduce ties
with one s community even helps to create oneself. This view has it
86 Green Political Thought
that work is an obligation both to oneself and to one s society, and that
this obligation has to be redeemed. The green favouring of work will
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