E3G

Third Generation Environmentalism: A mini manifesto

By Chris Littlecott

Moving the Agenda

Stabilising the climate, halting the collapse of ecosystems, building sustainable communities, meeting our long term needs for water, energy, food, health, fibre and minerals responsibly are core challenges of the 21st Century. Failure will undermine civilisation itself.

National, economic and personal security are all undermined by a degraded environment. Political instability, poverty and ill health all increase as environmental quality declines.

Humanity is not fundamentally short of the resources, technology and capital to deliver security and prosperity to all of the eight billion people that will soon share our planet. We know now how to do this without irreparably degrading the environment which supports all our livelihoods.

But our inability to put resources, technologies and capital together in ways that are sustainable is ever more apparent. Wherever you look, unsolved problems mount while the means to solve them lie unused.

Making it Work

The roots of today’s environmental problems lie deep in our current institutions and political processes. They are faults with the system as a whole. By their very nature, environmental problems cannot be dealt with from silos – from one government department, industry sector or advocacy position alone.

Changing institutional and political structures is a long term goal. In the meantime, we must make our existing system work better.

The E3G vision is that we can do much more with the structures and institutions we already have. We must enable third generation environmentalists to work better together across the institutional and political boundaries that obstruct change.

We believe that the information and communication technologies we now possess create new and under-used opportunities to mobilise effective responses to environmental challenges.

Our task is to accelerate the transition to sustainable development. Our role is to design new solutions to sustainable development problems fully engaging the realms of technology and economics, politics and culture.

We are guided by:

the need to link the possible to the practical by connecting reachable goals to next steps;

the need to build coalitions of support concurrently with policy proposals;

the need to create new tools and methods for problem solving;

the need to harness and align existing personal, professional and policy commitments;

the need to trace solutions through departmental and disciplinary boundaries.