Green Transition

An interview with Ralf Fücks, Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

The coming upheaval in our ways of living and working will require us to live an ecological lifestyle based on new forms of democratic participation that enable us to collectively and comprehensively reshape our social and physical environment.

Are political parties still capable of integrating the long term into their strategic reflections?

Modern representative democracy is not conducive to handling environmental challenges. Ecology requires new political institutions capable of tackling long-term concerns.

The specificity of ‘democratic radicality’ is by no means a bulwark for the Greens against developments or rationales that run counter to this ‘democratic requirement.’

One of the primary conclusions of the past five years is that the days of “easy politics” are gone, we have moved to an era of “hard politics.”

Nearly 30,000 people took to the streets of Berlin on January 18, 2014 to protest the industrialisation of farming and the E.U.-U.S Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation. In addition to making their demands heard, the organisers gave a voice and a face to Agrarwende, a citizen movement that is gaining steam in Germany and that calls for a rethinking of agriculture.

Greece ranks 15th globally in the number of tourist visitors each year, making the industry a major part of its economy. However for all the benefits the industry brings, poor management and planning threatens the beautiful landscape on which it is based. Recently passed laws look set to make this situation even worse, but WWF is proposing alternatives that can protect Greece’s tourist industry and its environment.

If we want to put finance on a leash with smart regulation, Greens must take the wind out of their opponent’s sails by having policies that simultaneously unleash finance and restore lending into the real economy and, above all, into a green industrial transformation.

The lessons of the last crisis always seem to be forgotten, and the financial world continues to grow and pose a risk to economy and planet. We Greens must marshal all our energy and ideas to reign it in.