GB No. 2, summer 1990
In this issue of GREEN BRIGADES we have published the report from the congress of the Green Federation. Now More about this party.
The Green Federation was founded in December'88. There are about a dozen of local groups, but it is difficult to specify the number, since we have no formal membership. The Federation was founded by the people who took part in forming of the Polish Green Party (Polską Partia Zielonych), but it turned out that our ideas are too different to be contained in one single organization. However we do not compete with PPZ. We simply believe we have different roles to play in the green movement. Both are necessary and neither one is more important nor the other.
The Green Federation was invited by "Solidarność" (Solidarity) to take part in the roundtable discussions between the government and opposition in the working group for ecological affairs. So far, on the national level, we have put most of our energy into resistance against nuclear power (around 10 demonstrations and Easter Marches, seminars, lobbying), and of alternative energy paths. As a result of common pressure of the Green movements all planned nuclear power stations but one have been canceled. The local groups of the Green Federation have been working on many local problems like city planning connected with local self-government (Kraków, Wrocław), waste management (Lublin), water treatment (Kalisz) and many other local ecological and social threats. People of the Federation have been traveling a lot, having been invited to numerous actions arranged by other ecological and peace movements. In our activities we try to create a tradition of common actions made by several groups without their organizational unification. We find it very important to overcome the spirit of competition between organizations and to replace it by the spirit of an internally diverse green community. We try to implant at least four features into green activities: deliberation, non-violence, joy and determination.
We find Poland being hit hard by numerous crises at the same time. To think that there are different crises isolated one from another is not the best way to understand them. People have no chance to meet their basic needs. They are lacking healthy and cheap food, medicines, flats, water, air, joy, freedom and vision. Our towns are turning into grimmy anthills, full of frustrated ants closed down in concrete wardrobes to live in. It is getting grey and sad around here.
We do not face an ecological disaster. We already have it. Poland has been acknowledged by the European Environmental Commission as being the most polluted country in Europe. The average Pole lives around 10 years shorter than his European counterpart.
Poland, along with the rest of the world, has entered a crisis situation of a new magnitude. New challenges make us look for new answers. There is still some time to change the direction of current developments that multiply threats much faster than profits. Let us employ some imagination and get free from wide-spread conventional thinking and behaving. Let us loose this strict jacket of institutions that bind freedom, selfrealization and possibilities for creative activity.
We are a network of groups of people searching for qualitatively new solutions in all areas of our life. We do not find our space in the traditional left-right political spectrum. That is why we have founded a party which is an alternative to most existing political groups in our country. We are the anti-party of the green alternative.
We can see the need to bring an end to the epoch of the power of experts. We are referring to experts in narrow, specialized sciences, experts on ideologies, on wars, discipline and order, on politics and common welfare. They can give advice on how to do something, but they can no longer decide whether to do it or not.
Our program is drawn out of the unity of three concepts - ecology, peace and democreation.
Ecology is our point of departure. For us ecology is not merely a set of isolated problems connected with environmental degradation. It is rather a way of looking at the world. A way of thinking as well in an individual and collective life style. It is awareness of interconnectedness of all elements and dimensions of reality. It means for us looking for the unity and harmony between man and nature and a man and other people. It is admiration of richness and diversity in the biological and social life. Furthermore it is an admission that life in all forms is of the highest value and a value in itself. Ecology means also for us - as Arne Naess put it - asking ever deeper questions where and when other people do not ask them and achieving rich ends by the simples means.
From such an understanding of ecology we draw out our economical programs. Economy can no longer be about values that are translated into the language of money. The present crisis situation can only be solved by asking the deep questions what we really do need and by careful recycling of the gifts of the planet. Both have to include qualitative choices. We advocate an economy that is oriented not towards the amount of production, but towards the quality of life. That is an economy that does not reduce biological, social and cultural diversity and affords possibilities for the comprehensive development of multidimen sional man. It means also considering the needs of the man as equal to the needs of the Planet, and rights of present people as equal to the rights of all future generations.
Our concept of peace is not based on security provided by a strong police-state authority, nor on a great army deterring foreign enemies. We shall feel secure in a society which is free from a life of stress, fear and permanent threat. Ecological and social security are necessary preconditions to achieve global peace. Ecology, peace and freedom are the same. Military disarmament is by far not enough for us. We want to dig out the social roots of war - the patterns of structural violence. We should demilitarize social, economical and political orders, freeing them from hierarchical and monolithic structures. We shall try to free the educational structures from bringing up people in the spirit of competition, blind obedience to authorities, violence and nationalism. We also are promoting alternatives to patterns of personal violence. In our activities as well as in our private lives, we are guided by the principle of non-violent resistance and non-violent creation.
We are not driven by the will to achieve power in the state. We consider the society in which some people exert power over others to be a society which reproduces violence and threatens the environment and itself. We reject the rituals and institutions of traditional, representative politics. We want the power politics performed by professional organizations, institutions or politicians on behalf of people to be replaced by the free activity of diverse human communities in charge of their development and their local environment. That is why in our political programs the concept of democracy was replaced by the concept of "democreation". We shall support and enforce all seeds of direct, participatory democracy - citizen initiatives and social movements. We believe, that in the case of basic disrespect of the will of the people, they have full right to demonstrate their demands and to resist against the decisions of the state authorities. This resistance however cannot be connected with the use of violence in any forms. The Green Federation wants to be one of the useful devices of such a civic self-defense. On the way to the ultimate vision of democreation within the local communities organized on the base of bio-cultural regions and not subordinated to the power structures of the state, we shall support the existing local selfgoverning structures in their efforts to achieve autonomy and independence from the central state power. That is why we intend to influence, cooperate and even enter local councils and governments and drive them in the direction of self-management.
The Green Federation