Blog

four years later

After an unexpectedly longer hiatus than anticipated we're back in the custodial and editorial seats and the site has been taken off auto-pilot for a batch of new material to be prepared and uploaded and several new articles to be written and published here.

We remain convinced that it is essential to make history accessible in unmediated form as well as providing commentary and interpretation. We recognise that all writing about events in the past carries a baggage of, often unrecognised, assumptions, prejudices, and biases. This is especially insidious when the author is presented as some kind of authority or expert on the historical era being discussed. 

  

A brief word of explanation about the lack of progress in here since February. Nothing has been done for the past month, and not much is likely to get done until after Easter.

The reason is simply that more pressing concerns about the Ecological Collapse and Climate Chaos that has clearly now started have taken priority in my life. I have become somewhat involved in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement, which does seem to be a movement whose time has finally come. After 40 years of frankly pissing around with trivial (in the grand scheme) changes without tackling the underlying problem of an unsustainable civilisation, a section of the green movement is finally waking up and preparing to take direct action in support of changes needed to attempt to stabilise the climate and the eco-systems of which we are a part somewhere short of mass extinction of virtually all mammalian life and hopefully (but less likely) before the collapse of our civilisation.

  

Been doing more tinkering this week with the vexed question of how best to organise and catalogue the growing amount of material. I'd like to get things improved before the next big tranche of documents gets uploaded as I feel that we haven't got it right yet.

The first issue is that there are three distinct types of material on here. There are articles which appear in this main area on the page with menus and other information above and to the right. Then there are images - photos and graphics - which generally appear embedded in articles, but may also form pages of image galleries on particular themes or events (or they will when I get around to it...). And thirdly there are the source documents which are available for download as pdf files from the Document Library. 

  

There is, and has been from the beginning, much confusion about the difference between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecology’, as can be seen in statements put out by PEOPLE’s founders all the way through to the national Green Party in 2018.

Although they often used the word ‘environment’ to describe their politics PEOPLE (the first name of the Green Party) was really an ecological party, from the beginning. The name PEOPLE (always spelt in capitals), however, caused some confusion. Because of it many observers believed the party was primarily concerned with social justice. To correct this impression the party decided, in 1975, to change its name to the Ecology Party. It wanted to firmly root its approach in the new thinking being promulgated by The Ecologist magazine and others. 

  

Where has Green-History been?

If you are reading this it means that the server problems that have caused everything to become invisible for a couple of days have been resolved.

Apparently there was a technical issue involving a conflict between different parts of the internet as to on which server green-history.uk was actually located. Various "name-servers" (the computers that tell other computers like the one you are reading this on where to find a particular website) got messed up during a server upgrade. 

  

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