From single-issue dissent to a sustainable revolution

It is 40 years since I marched behind Bertrand Russell on the road from Aldermaston (a long way behind, in a boisterous Scottish contingent singing, "Och! Och! Get oot the Holy Loch, for we dinna want Polaris!", a refrain that can still surface at moments of frustration). It's also a couple of decades since I reported for this newspaper the first and ultimately successful rumblings of dissent against the ESB's plans for a nuclear power station at Carnsore Point, Co Wexford.

For me, at 20-something, "The Bomb" was a single issue, worth getting sore feet for, if not actually sitting down to block Whitehall and being hauled off by the police. Civil disobedience then seemed to me too daunting a step, even in such exalted company.

For the people, mainly young, who will gather at Carnsore's grassy promontory next month to listen to Hothouse Flowers and add their stone to the cairn of Carnvaha - "a festival for the Earth and a nuclear-free future" (http://www.carnvaha.com) - the continuing menace from Sellafield is just one strand in a whole spectrum of protest. The theft of economic power and Earth's natural assets (among them, clean seas and air) by a globalising, free-market capitalism impinges on everyone's ideals, whether on environmental issues or social equity.

The counter-revolution market economics has spawned is sometimes dramatised by violence, as at Seattle and Genoa, but is generally more tender and even spiritual in its aims. At the other end of anarchy from the brick and petrol bomb is the vision of a community too local, caring and self-sustaining to need a lot of government, still less the exploitation of transnational corporations.

The term "civil society" has emerged to describe the growing network of thinkers, activists, social groups and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) concerned with the direction and quality of the human presence on Earth. Its cultural objectives often have a political dimension but reject the familiar politics of short-term pragmatism, with no vision other than perpetual material growth and progressive destruction of the natural world.

The US, fountainhead of multi-national capitalism, is now the source of many vigorous alternatives as well. It is also, of course, the source of the internet, which has spread news of revolution in some unexpected places.

In Oberlin, Ohio, for example, at the start of the year, some 40 academics, technocrats, environmentalists and cultural leaders came together in a three-day "future-search conference", which ended in the founding of a network called ESDA (Envisioning A Sustainable and Desirable America). In the group's vision of the US in 2100, single-occupancy cars will be gone and most people will live in self-sufficient, arcadian communities, walking or cycling to work. "Private lawns will virtually disappear", since most gardens will be growing food, and the redundant motorways will be cracked open to plant trees, thus helping nature to reclaim a lot of territory.

These are a few of the more striking notions in a comprehensive document (find it at http://iee.umces.edu/ESDA). It bears the mark of what have been termed "cultural creatives", whose mood for social change is said now to inspire a fast-growing 50 million Americans, or one in four of the population. It shows consensus on a need for a spiritual connection with nature, the rejection of consumption as the main goal and satisfaction in life, and a sustainable economy.

This cultural shift and its significance for the global democracy movement are discussed by David Korten in the impressive first issue of Feasta Review.

Feasta is the Dublin-based Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, a registered educational charity launched in 1998. It is already influential outside Ireland, partly thanks to the ideas expressed by Richard Douthwaite in books such as The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit. With John Jopling, he edits the new Feasta Review, which seems certain to attract an international audience.

David Korten is the Harvard Business School lecturer who went on to work in development aid in Asia and to write two influentially polemical books, When Corporations Rule The World and The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. It is his rousing Feasta lecture in Trinity College last year that is printed in the review.

Beside it comes an equally readable lecture by another unquiet American, Prof Herman Daly, who knits economics into ecology to exact a proper value for the capital that is nature. Lothar Mayer, a German green economist, gets even more specific, proposing a sales tax system, like VAT, which passes on a charge for all the polluting CO 2 involved in making a product or providing a service.

FINE GAEL'S John Bruton, too, reviewing an American book on the local politics of global sustainability, would influence consumer decisions by shifting taxes towards spending. But he agrees that conventional professional politics, in a liberal democracy like the Republic, is unlikely ever to deliver the lifestyle changes needed to create a sustainable world: only "a religious sense" will engender that kind of moral responsibility to future generations. Policy analyst David Fleming predicts a more material impetus, in an essay starkly headed "After Oil".

How does all this connect with the civil society of Ireland, and particularly that section of it that goes to protest festivals? Largely electronically, as you might expect. Feasta's doings are posted on the monthly network bulletin of Sustainable Ireland, the co-operative that ran the recent Convergence Festival in Dublin.

These bulletins chronicle the world of alternative economics, permaculture courses and waste recycling, eco-village open days and straw-bale building, conflict resolution and Buddhist retreats. Here is the spirit uplifted, nature extolled and multi-nationals unmasked. Send an e-mail with "subscribe" in the subject box to sustainable.ireland@anu.ie. Feasta itself is a membership organisation (www.feasta.org and e-mail: feasta@anu.ie).

Feasta Review is available by post at £15 (£25 to institutions) from The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability, 159 Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6.

viney@anu.ie