The 'four pillars' of Green politics &emdash; ecology, grass roots democracy, social responsibility, and non-violence &emdash; have served as a touchstone for the Green movement and as a popular platform for many Green parties. Nonetheless, there is a diversity of views among Green theorists and activists as to the meaning, scope, and political implications of these four basic principles. Perhaps the most contested, and potentially the most revolutionary, of these four Green principles is 'ecology'. The normative disagreement among Greens concerns both the status and meaning of the principle of ecology. These are crucial questions that have a direct bearing on how ecological concerns are to be integrated with the Green movement's social concerns. As to the status of ecology, two general kinds of interpretation can be identified.

First, there are those who argue that ecological concerns ought not to be privileged in relation to the concerns of other new social movements (such as those concerned with Third World aid, peace, women, and other social justice issues). This approach&emdash;which is defended by many eco-socialists&emdash;may be designated the 'rainbow alternative'. The alternative and more predominant view is that an ecological perspective should play a determinant theoretical role in Green politics since the continuation of social life is dependent on a healthy biological support system. According to this view, an ecological perspective ought to provide the framework within which the concerns of human emancipatory movements can be integrated. This approach may be designated the 'ecology first' intpretation.

Those who accord primacy to ecological concerns do not, however, all attribute the same meaning to ecological concerns. This is hardly surprising given that the modern environmental movement is an extraordinarily diverse phenomenon encompassing a wide range of often conflicting philosophical perspectives. Indeed, in one view, any perspective that stops short of a completely 'open slather' development approach qualifies as an 'environmental perspective' of some kind. This helps to explain why 'environmentalism' has acquired something of a 'motherhood' status.

Greens, of course, have moved well beyond the first wave of environmentalism known as 'resource conservation' which provided the first major step in the movement away from the buccaneerism of early industrialism and towards some semblance of environmental responsibility. The resource conservation movement sought to replace the reckless plunder of natural resources with the 'wise use' or scientific management of natural resources. Note well, however, that this perspective remained a thorough-going utilitarian perspective that sought to eliminate waste and secure a 'maximum sustainable (economic) yield'. In other words, it was considered just as wasteful to exploit resources inefficiently as it was not to exploit them at all. Today, resource conservation provides one of the least controversial ecological perspectives that is more usually defended by resource development agencies and businesses than by grass roots environmentalists.

Most Greens identify with an ecological perspective that challenges the cornucopian assumptions and technologically optimistic aspirations of the post-World War Two growth consensus (assumptions and aspirations that remain embedded in the resource conservation perspective). However, they divide over how far these assumptions and aspirations need to be revised&emdash; a division that may be traced ultimately to fundamental eco-philosophical differences concerning the role of humans in the evolutionary drama. The most basic eco-philosophical cleavage, which follows the eco-philosophical cleavage that is central to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of environmental philosophy, is between 'anthropocentric Greens' and 'ecocentric Greens'. Anthropocentric Greens maybe characterised by their concern to articulate an eco-political theory and practice that offers new opportunities for human emancipation and fulfilment in the context of an ecologically sustainable world. Ecocentric Greens pursue these same goals within the context of a broader notion of emancipation that seeks to ensure that the non-human world may also unfold in its many diverse ways.

The essential difference between these two approaches is that the former values the non-human world only for its instrumental or use value to humankind (whether material or otherwise) whereas the latter also values the non-human world for its own sake, irrespective of its use-value to humans. Greens who adopt the 'rainbow interpretation' regarding the status of ecological concerns invariably adopt an anthropocentric interpretation with respect to the meaning of ecology. However, as already noted, Greens who adopt the 'ecology first' interpretation do not necessarily adopt an ecocentric interpretation. This is because it is quite possible to argue that ecological concerns should have theoretical and practical primacy and also argue that those ecological concerns should be defended on purely human-centred grounds (healthy ecosystems provide, among other things, the fundamental good of human life support).

Debates concerning the status and meaning of the principle of ecology in Green politics vary in emphasis and intensity from region to region. This variation is influenced by a range of factors, including the composition of the environment movement, the nature of environmental problems, and the intellectual traditions and political framework in the region or country in question. Here I intend to pay special attention to one further and particularly striking factor from the point of view of the anthropocentric / ecocentric cleavage, namely, the degree of human (or, more particularly, European) domestication of the landscape. In particular, I want to highlight the fact that the existence of large tracts of relatively 'undeveloped' wilderness areas in North America, Australasia, and Scandinavia has meant that wilderness preservationist conflicts &emdash; and hence debates concerning the importance and moral standing of the nonhuman world&emdash;have tended to be a more significant feature of the Green debates in these countries compared to 'domesticated' Europe (excluding certain parts of Scandinavia). This is especially applicable to Tasmania, where wilderness preservation campaigns have been in the forefront of the State's environmental controversies since the Lake Pedder campaign of the early 1970s.

In Britain and Continental Europe, on the other hand, the anti-nuclear, anti-pollution, and peace movements have, for rather obvious reasons, had a relatively greater influence on Green politics than have movements for the preservation of wilderness. This particular difference has helped to shape the ways in which ecological problems have been theorised in these respective continents. The result has been that much greater critical attention has been given to the notion of anthropocentrism by environmental philosophers in Tasmania than in Europe.

The two streams of environmentalism that have helped to shape what is most distinctive about Green politics in Europe and Australasia (and Tasmania in particular) are what I call the human welfare ecology movement and the preservationist movement. The different environmental issues raised by these two movements have helped to generate different philosophical debates and different ecological orientations among Greens in these two regions &emdash; differences that may be mapped, very roughly, onto the anthropocentric/ecocentric cleavage. This contrast is less pronounced in North America, however, where the human welfare ecology movement and the preservationist movement have both been particularly active&emdash;although the preservationist movement has certainly left its ecocentric mark on US Green ecological principles.

A brief comparison of the human welfare ecology movement and the preservationist movement will help to draw out what is most distinctive about Green politics in Tasmania by showing how different environmental issues can generate different ecological orientations.

The human welfare ecology movement

The movement for a safe, clean, and pleasant human environment has a long pedigree, although the pace, reach, and expectations of this movement have grown considerably since the onset of the industrial revolution, and even more so since the 1960s. Whereas the labour movement had been in the forefront of the early wave of demands for a safer work environment, the late 20th century bearers of this movement have increasingly been citizens, consumers, and 'householders' rather than waged employees. This is reflected in the increasing role played by women in urban ecological protest and in the changing sites of political struggle&emdash;from the factory to the household, street, shopping mall, and local municipal government. That human welfare ecology protest may appear today to be a peculiarly late 20th century phenomenon is attributable as much to the rapid escalation in urban and agricultural environmental problems since the Second World War as to the emergence of 'post-material' values borne by the so called 'new middle class'.

The accumulation of toxic chemicals or 'intractable wastes'; the intensification of ground, air, and water pollution generally; the growth in new 'diseases of affluence' (heart disease, cancer); the growth in urban and coastal high rise development; the dan- gers of nuclear plants and nuclear wastes; the growth in the nuclear arsenal; and the problems of global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer have all posed increasing threats to human survival safety, and wellbeing.

The human welfare ecology movement has laid down a considerable challenge to the narrow, economistic focus of resource , conservationists. Whereas the resource conservation movement has been primarily concerned with improving economic productivity by achieving the maximum sustainable yield of 'natural resources' the major preoccupation of the human welfare ecology movement has been the health, safety, and general amenity of the urban and agricultural environments&emdash;a concern that is often encapsulated in the general term 'environmental quality'. Moreover, in focusing on both the physical and social limits to growth, the human welfare ecology stream has done much to draw attention to those human needs neglected by the resource conservation perspective (namely, the health, amenity, recreational and psychological needs of human communities).

More significantly, the human welfare ecology movement, unlike the resource conservation movement, has been highly critical of economic growth and the idea that science and technology alone can deliver us from the ecological crisis (although it has, of course, been dependent on the findings of ecological science to mount its case). Indeed, the kind of ecological perpective that has informed this stream of environmentalism is encapsulated in Barry Commoner's 'four laws of ecology' in The C1osing Circle: everything is connected to everything else, every-

thing must go somewhere, nature knows best (that is, any major human intervention in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system), and there is no such thing as a free lunch. These popularly expressed ecological insights have challenged the sanguine belief that, in time, we can successfully manage all our large-scale interventions in natural systems without any negative consequences for ourselves. The realisation that there is no 'away' where we can dump our garbage, toxic and nuclear wastes, and other kinds of pollution has given rise to calls for a new stewardship ethic&emdash;that we must protect and nurture the biological support system upon which we are dependent. Practically, this has led to widespread calls for 'appropriate technology' and 'soft' energy paths, organic agriculture, alternative medicine, public transport, recycling, and more generally, a revaluation of human needs and a search for more ecologically benign lifestyles.

Since it is in urban areas that we find the greatest concentration of population, pollution, industrial and occupational hazards, traffic, dangerous technologies, planning and development conficts, and hazardous wastes, it is hardly surprising that cities and their hinterlands have provided the major locale for, and focus of, political agitation for the human welfare ecology movement. Nor is it surprising that the human welfare ecology movement has been the strongest current of environmentalism inGreen politics in the most heavily industrialised and domesticated regions of the West, most notably Europe. In particular, the many different popular environmental protests or 'citizen's initiatives in West Germany that provided the major impetus to the formation of the party, Die Grunen, have primarily been urban ecological protests falling within this general rubric.

By virtue of its primary concern for human welfare in the domesticated environment, however, this stream has generally mounted its case in purely human-centred terms. That is, the public justification given for environmenta1 reforms by human welfare ecology activists has tended to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of the human community (for our survival, for our children, for our future generations, for our health and amenity). Indeed, the human welfare ecology steam has no need to go any further than this in order to make its case: it is enough to point out that 'we must look after nature because it looks after us'. Moreover, defenders of this perspective can say to their ecocentric critics that most human welfare ecology reforms would, in any event, directly improve the wellbeing of the nonhuman community as well. Why, they ask, should we challenge the public and lose the support of politicians with perplexing and off-beat ideas like 'nature for its own sake' when we can achieve substantially the same ends as those sought by ecocentric theorists on the basis of our own acceptable anthropocentric arguments?

The ecocentric rejoinder to this argument is that if we restrict our ecological perspective to a human welfare ecology perspective we can provide no protection to those species that are of no present or potential use or interest to humankind. More generally, an anthropocentric framework is also likely to reinforce attitudes that are detrimental to the achievement of comprehensive environmental reform in the long run because human interests will systematically prevail over the interest of the non-human world. As Fox explains in Toward a Transpersonal Ecology employing only anthropocentric arguments for the sake of expediency might win the occasional environmental battle, but in the long term 'one is contributing to losing the ecological war by reinforcing the cultural perception that what is valuable in the non-human world is valuable only insofar as it is valuable to humans'.

Preservationism

If the essence of the resource conservation stream is the 'wiseuse' of 'natural resources', and the essence of the human welfare ecology stream is the health, amenity, and safety of the domesticated environment, then the essence of the early preservationist stream may be described as reverence&emdash;a sense of aesthetic and spiritual appreciation of wildemess. Whereas resource conservationists are concerned to conserve nature for development, preservationists are concerned to prescrve nature from develop.

The precedent for the reservation of huge wilderness areas was set in the latter half of the 19th century, the most significant milestone being the designation of over two million acres of north-western Wyoming as Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Similar developments were also occurring in Australia; the 18,000 acre Royal National Park near Sydney was set aside in 1879 'for the use of the public forever as a national park'. Whereas the early reservations were made primarily in order to preserve 'scenery' and provide recreational facilities for the public, the 20th century has witnessed a considerable broadening of the case for preservation along with its base of popular support.

Wildemess was once feared by the early European colonists in New Worlds such as Australia and North America as a hostile force to be tamed; but to an increasing number of Westerners wilderness has become, for a complex range of reasons, a subject of reverence, enlightenment, and a locus of tangible and symbolic values both threatened and new. The success of The Tasmanian Wilderness Society's campaign to 'save' the Franklin River from a proposed dam by the Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania is one of the latest in a series of preservationist campaigns that have drawn support from a growing wellspring of popular sentiment and concern for wilderness. Indeed, the campaigns for wilderness preservation, more than other environmental campaigns, have generated the most radical philosophical challenges to stock assumptions concerning our place in the scheme of things, thereby forcing theorists to confront the question of the moral standing of the non-human world.

Despite John Muir's pious and outmoded vocabulary, his public defence of 'wild nature' has made a lasting impression on the modem preservationist imagination:

"The world we are told was made for man. A presumption that is totally unsupported by the facts . . . Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small composing unit of the one great unit of creation, and what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is less essential to the grand completeness of that unit?"

The link between Muir's particular pantheistic world-view and the ecocentric philosophy of more recent times is widely acknowledged although there are important differences.

Insofar as wilderness appreciation has developed into a cult in search of sublime settings for 'peak experiences' (religious or otherwise) or simply places of rest, recreation, and aesthetic delight&emdash;'tonics' for jaded Western souls&emdash;it tends to converge with the human welfare ecology perspective in offering yet another kind of human-centred justification for restraining development. This trend has been dually reversed, however, as the preservationist movement has become more ecologically and philosophically informed. The modern preservationist movement and ecocentric Greens are now not only concerned to 'save' those places that are aesthetically appealing according to Western cultural mores (pristine lofty mountains, grand canyons, and wild rivers). They are also concerned to protect threatened habitats and species wherever situated and regardless of their aesthetic appeal, interest, or use to humans.

More recently, environmental philosophers have pointed to the wide range of anthropocentric utilitarian arguments that have been advanced in favour of wilderness preservation (some of which have already been canvassed above). For example, wilderness provides a stockpile of genetic diversity for medicine and agriculture, a place of human recreation, a place of spiritual renewal, and subject of scientific study. Ecocentric Greens do not regard this list as providing an exhaustive statement of the reasons for protecting wilderness since it only registers the value of wilderness to humans. Ecocentric Greens are just as concerned to see that the myriad inhabitants of the non-human world are able to pursue their own evolutionary destinies. It is easy to see how many of the more tangible anthropocentric arguments for the preservation of wilderness can be quite persuasive politically, especially the more economically inclined arguments such as those that refer to the recreational potential of wilderness or those that demonstrate the importance of maintaining genetic diversity to provide new applications in medicine and agriculture. However, it is important not to underestimate the political potency of some of the less tangible arguments for wilderness preservation. For example, the preservation of wild nature is seen by many as both a symbolic act of resistance against urban and cultural monoculture and the materialism and greed of consumer society, and a defence of a certain cluster of values of social significance such as freedom, spontaneity, community, diversity, and, in some cases, national or regional identity. In this respect, Thoreau's oft-quoted dictum &emdash; 'In wilderness lies the preservation of the world'&emdash;may be seen as taking on both an ecological and political meaning.

The modern preservationist movement has prompted the asking of deep-seated questions concerning human identity. After all, examining our relationship to other life forms tells us some- thing about ourselves&emdash;about our modern character and the kinds of values and dispositions that our society encourages or discourages. It is precisely this kind of ecophilosophical soul searching that has helped to generate the modern ecocentric perspective, which is concerned to respect and value all beings (including humans) as ends in themselves rather than as means to our own individual or collective self-aggrandisement. Here, too, the traditional wisdom of the indigenous inhabitants of New World regions&emdash;the Eskimo, the North American Indian, the Australian Aborigine&emdash;has provided lessons in humility and in the importance of the sacred.

Ecocentrism demystified

To defend an ecocentric Green perspective is not to downplay the importance of human welfare ecology concerns. Rather, an ecocentric Green perspective seeks to provide a more comprehensive framework within which to address these concerns.

Indeed, it would be self-defeating for ecocentric Greens to focus exclusively on setting aside pockets of pristine wilderness while ignoring the growing problems of over-population and pollution since these problems will sooner or later affect the remaining fragments of wild nature. In this respect, human welfare ecology concerns complement preservationist concerns, as most contemporary wilderness activists are quick to recogniise.

In any event, ecocentric Greens are not only concerned to protect non-human life. Rather, an ecocentric perspective provides an inclusive ecophilosophical framework that recognises the full range of human interests in the non-human world; recognises the interests of the non-human community, recognises the interests of future generations of humans and non-humans; and adopts a holistic rather than an atomistic perspective insofar as it values populations, species, ecosystems, and the ecosphere as well as individual organisms.

Ecocentrism is not a misanthropic (that is, anti-human) perspective, as many critics allege. Rather, it is a nonanthro- pocentric perspective that is against the ideology of human chauvism. The distinction is crucial. As David Ehrenfeld observes, while humanism 'has its nobler parts', and therefore ought not to be totatty rejected,

"we have been too gentle and uncritical of it in the past, and it has grown ugly and dangerous. Humanism itself, like the rest of our existence, must now be protected against its own excesses. Fortunately, there are humane alternatives to the arrogance of humanism".

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