Green, or ecological ideology, locates its central animating concern outside of the human community in nature and especially the interlocking ecosystems that crisscross the Earth. No doubt there are many competing forms of ecological politics – some which decentre human life more radically than others. But the unique magnetic force experienced by the multiple followers of this map is largely due to the importance it ascribes not only to plants and animals, but also to lakes, rivers, mountains, forests, seas, and all the other habitats that serve as home to living creatures. For green politics, the planet is centrally significant.

This chapter starts by reconstructing the ethical and meaningmaking resources of green ideology, which originated in nineteenthcentury romanticism and its rejection of the Enlightenment's picture of nature as a mechanics. This critique of a machine-like cosmos was pioneered not only by romantic poets but also by writers such as Henry David Thoreau, who carried out radical new experiments in living. A diffuse ethos derived from these various figures subsequently seeped into competing ideologies from across the political spectrum, creating various fusions that continue to confound the dualism of left versus right.

In what follows, I establish the liquidity of green politics, which, like feminism, is not a solid structural object that can be cleanly taxonomized as “on the left”. Instead, it is a cultural map that is creatively adopted by an almost dizzying array of rival perspectives. These include the more strenuously anti-industrial politics of deep ecologists, counterculture hippies and pastoral conservatives, as well as the incremental and reform-minded approaches of eco-progressives and right libertarians. Lastly, there are various politics of ecological emergency that have intermixed with both socialist and fascist ideology. Thus, a cultural approach explodes the myth of a monumental green politics that is reducible to “tree huggers” and “environmental activists”. To remain within these culture war clichés is not only to block true understanding of one's own time but also to obscure the conflicting sources of meaning that often inform and complicate one's very own politics.