As for how it arose, I gather it is just another researcher using this basic method:

Ask a group of people a question. Collect all the answers. Do any answers appear to fall into classes? Using appropriate techniques to discern distinct classes of answers, you discover they gave you 7 classes of answers.
Now ask another group from another culture. Do you get the same classes of answers?
Ten years later, go back and ask the same people the same question. Do you still get the same 7 classes of answers? Yes? OK, do notice anything else? Well, the people who earlier gave answer A, now give answer B. Those who earlier gave answer B, now give answer C. In no event to you find someone who earlier gave answer C now giving answer A.
So what you have discovered is that not only do there exist 7 classes of answers out there, but that these follow a developmental sequence.

You can apply this, assuming the questions and tests are done properly, to a number of things. In Spiral Dynamics they looked at Values.

The resulting map that the model gives you, should hopefully be simple enough to be universally useful, but not so simple that it dumbs things down.

Bear in mind it is only based on one type of question. Other researchers look at different questions—cognitive development, for example. A human isn’t a colour, but they have an aspect at that time in their lives that expresses that colour.

The model uses colour codes because, as they observed, the Value systems arise in a sequence, but we don’t want to name them 1,2,3,4… as that suggests that 5 is “the best”. Rather, each colour is better suited to certain kinds of life conditions/problems. If today you moved to Iraq, it would help to learn to activate some Purple, because that’s more prevalent there.

One of the aspects of Green that I’ve seen mentioned a lot, is that Green is very concerned with protecting those who are marginalised and powerless. It is concerned with finding and helping victims. These could be victims of racism or sexism, but it could also be polar bears. See?

Maybe, just maybe, this deeply held value that we need to help the victims, is what’s partly driving some environmentalists to hold that a monkey or a polar bear is more valuable than a human, in the sense of, we would really rather put their interests above our own. Maybe this is what the Editors are picking up on as being basically anti-human instead of humanistic.

I think we need to remember that Green values arose partly in reaction to the abuses of colonialism, which simply exploited native people, and made them victims of our greed. And now, in some sense, we do the same to polar bears and coral reefs.

As I say, these 7 colours were not “invented”, they were simply what arose empirically when researchers asked the question (whether it was done properly is another issue). What’s also interesting is that their ongoing research is finding that the newest generation of kids in the West is starting to provide a new class of answer, one not seen much in the earlier research; the new answer/meme is the Yellow meme. This is a new stage arising beyond the Green stage.

Perhaps people are already waking up to the problems inherent in the Green stage, just as Green is gaining political power.

“You state baldly without any justification that environmentalism is a philosophy and that it is incompatible with humanism because “It proposes that our principal relationship is not with each other, but with the natural world.” No matter how many times I read that I cannot explain how you reached that conclusion because you just don’t say.”

We do justify this view, on page, after page, after page of this blog. We ‘justify’ it in the post above, like this:

Any notion which doesn’t take the possibility of global catastrophe for granted is excluded from the discussion, and so the discussion about how to organise our lives is premised on the idea that if we don’t recognise environmental imperatives, we will necessarily create Thermageddon. The problem with any such calculation is that its conclusion is its premise. It exists prior to the scientific investigation of our influence on the climate, and it exists prior to the discussion about how human society will in turn be influenced by that change, and how we ought to respond.

Keywords: ‘premised’, and ‘prior’.

One way in which the environmental argument posits a relationship between people mediated by the natural world is captured in the claim that ‘climate change will be worse for the poor’. This does indeed appear to ‘humanist’, and is given as a reason to mitigate climate change through emissions reduction. We discuss this claim at http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/06/the-illusion-and-politics-of-necessity.html and http://www.climate-resistance.org/2009/06/the-age-of-the-age-of-stupid.html . The 150,000 deaths cited by the WHO and 300,000 deaths by the GHF fade into insignificance when it is shown that the deaths attributed to climate change are just simply n-th order effects of climate change, and are in fact principally problems of (lack of) development. Addressing those 150/300 thousand deaths as social/political/economic problems would have the effect of saving tens of millions of lives.

Yet environmentalists stress the natural component. The implication is that poverty is ‘natural’. Accordingly, environmentalists give a naturalised account of social problems.

For a more philosophical argument, Ben wrote a review of James Garveys ‘Ethics of Climate Change’ for the Culture Wars website last year, which is discussed here http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/07/ethics-of-ethics-of-climate-change.html . A humanist framework exists in contrast to a naturalistic one, as is explained :

And without that form of environmental determinism to provide him with imperatives, Garvey would find it very difficult to explain what ‘justice’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘values’ actually are. It is only in the face of a problem that he can generate any meaning to provide these terms with. He can’t conceive, for example, of an argument for equality in human terms, he needs environmental crisis in order to legitimise an argument for negative equality. He can’t conceive of an argument for justice without a crime. Not, notice, a crime against a person, but a crime against the environment, which is later visited on people by consequence. This is ‘environmental justice’. He cannot conceive of any human values without connecting humans to the environment. This empty perspective is finally shown in his appeal that we ’start small, with everyday thoughts about doing the right thing’ – he cannot conceive of big things like solving the material inequalities that allow people to suffer from the effects of climate. He cannot conceive of a genuine form of justice, where people are protected from the climate. He doesn’t value that sort of justice. He doesn’t think we have that kind of responsibility. This ‘thinking small’ mentality barely registers as even thinking at all. According to this ’small’ doctrine, justice is done, equality is achieved, and your responsibilities are met by having a shower instead of bath, recycling your newspapers, and not using plastic bags. Who would have thought that ending world poverty was so spectacularly easy?

You state baldly without any justification that environmentalism is a philosophy and that it is incompatible with humanism because “It proposes that our principal relationship is not with each other, but with the natural world.” No matter how many times I read that I cannot explain how you reached that conclusion because you just don’t say. It seems to be an idea invented by yourselves. Yet your assertion logically fails because we as a species are dependent on what we can get from the planet. Therefore caring for the planet* can easily be simply humanist self-preservation. I don’t deny that there are nutjob Earth Goddess worshippers out there who think man is a virus but the question is – are they representative of environmentalists or are they parasites** which is what i contended. You haven’t proven one scenario is more plausible than the other.

You use your initial assumption to reach the conclusion. But was it a valid assumption or was it just another value-laden judgment that Mike Hulme warns us about? As you didn’t give any justification for it and as it fails a very basic logic test then I fear so.

Furthermore, “even deniers admit we shouldn’t foul our own nests” is true but if we don’t actively do something to help avoid other people fouling the environment then by definition we are not active environmentalists, ie those people who try to stop large-scale pollution, dumping etc by industry and who sometimes risk prison, fines, or their very lives and who sacrifice the home comforts that armchair critics enjoy.*** So that meagre argument doesn’t support your earlier assertion either.

I am encouraged by true environmentalists such as Bellamy and Taylor trying to combat the hysteria. I don’t think it’s productive to lump them in with the wackos, most of whom just moved onto this issue from the previous anti-globalization movements anyway.

*[By which i mean not fouling it by industrial waste or over-exploiting or destroying a natural resource (eg fish, coral, mangroves) to the point at which it can't easily recover]

**[Similar to the militant tendency that attached itself to the Labour party if you want an analogy.]

***[Note this group doesn't include Monbiot, Suzuki, Porrit etc but it does include Bellamy.]

http://www.spiraldynamics.org/pdf_resources/SD_MiniCourse_H.pdf

There’s a nice article in WIE magazine (I don’t like WIE, but they did do a nice article):

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/spiral/content/spiraldynamics.pdf

I propose an experiment. I just read the Sarah Burnside article whilst forgetting what I’ve heard about Spiral Dynamics. In it she appears to be wrestling with the accusation that environmentalists are religious and anti-human. She does this as if to show she understands quite well these accusations. Then she says these are “straw men”. She concludes by asserting that environmentalism is actually “humanism”.

I missed the part where she explains why the accusations are wrong. Isn’t that really bizarre? Someone says 2+2=4 and you reply, no, it is 5. They say, wait, how does it make 5. And you say, “because it does”.

Now here’s what I read whilst bearing in mind the model of Spiral Dynamics. (I’m no expert so please do have a good read of the linked articles, and I’ll go with it.) Sarah is obviously aware that there are many world views out there, however, the only labels she has heard of, are the usual labels like “Left”, “Right”, “Extreme Left”, “Progressive”, and so on. Sarah doesn’t seem to know what to call her own world view. But she does know that she is being called a lot of things by other people, words like “anti-human”, “religious”, and so on. Again, these labels make no sense to her, in as much as, they are all designed to try to make her look wrong.

As far as Sarah knows, somehow, deep down, she is doing good, she is right, and the problem is simply how to stop the others from gaining the upper hand.

In Spiral Dynamics, the worldview is called a “values system” (vmeme). The world view values its own perspective above all other perspectives. Deep down there are certain key components that exist unquestioned. Now before all the rational people go off saying this proves that environmentalism is religious, the ORANGE worldview/vmeme in SD is the one that values “progress by learning nature’s secrets and benefitting from them” (science, technology, rationality, etc.) Now feel how hard it is to believe that this worldview could be wrong, actually totally wrong. See, that’s your own values.

People who aren’t in the ORANGE worldview, on the other hand, can quite happily step back and say, “see, these industry types keep believing they can just solve everything with a quick technical fix, but no, we can’t just keep trying technical fixes, the whole reason we got into this mess is because of technology, technical fixes are just WRONG!”

Which worldview would say that? Well, probably any other worldview than ORANGE. However, let’s be a bit more discerning. In SD, all the worldviews/values/vmemes arose one by one, through history. PURPLE is older than RED, RED is oder than BLUE, BLUE is older than ORANGE, and so on. Whenever the conditions in life presented problems that couldn’t be solved by the then existing highest vmeme, humanity evolved a new one.

ORANGE was the dawn of science and technology and many other very good things. The vmemes are really about culture. ORANGE said “think for yourselves”, but in order to do that, it also had to say, “because all men are created equal”. It was the beginning of the end of slavery. The old ways of Kings, and Churches, and God-given authorities, and serfdom, were dying, and in its place, democracy started to rise.

The world saw huge advances in technology, but also in freedom for individuals.

Fast forward to the present day, past the end of Apartheid, past the Feminist movement, to 2009 and climate change. Today, SD estimates that in the West, about 50% of people are ORANGE, but some 25% are GREEN. (IIRC) But wait, what’s the GREEN vmeme? Well, imagine your childhood, where you had everything you needed materially, you had the games console, all the latest music, you had access to great sports facilities, and you certainly were well fed. You had central hearing, air con, fridges, microwaves, even a car. You had all the benefits of the industrial rational world. But you also had a father who was never home, and you had little sense of meaning in your life, you felt like you could be a great consumer, but surely, there was more to life?

In your search for meaning, you couldn’t go to Church, that was a long dead avenue of authoritarian power structures, so instead you went looking for alternatives, like yoga, buddhism, psychotherapy, and other cultures in general. You became more aware of the world and you wanted to travel see life outside the city, taste native cultures, and continue your quest for meaningful connection. You might also join an environmentalist group.

I’m loosely trying to describe the forms that GREEN worldview can take. Note that the SD vmemes are meant to be deep structures, like DNA. Someone could be in Greenpeace because they are looking for meaningful bonds (GREEN). But they could just as easily be in Greenpeace because they like to turn up at protests and kick people’s heads in (RED).

When SD theorists devised ways to test and measure people’s vmemes, they began to discover interesting things. It became apparent that anti-war protests contained more people who’s worldview was basically committed to self-preservation (they didn’t want to fight), and only a minority were genuinely of a vmeme that was committed to world peace.

Take any group and you can find that, each individual is centred around a particular vmeme, and the group dynamics are affected by how many there are of each.

The founder of Greenpeace could have been YELLOW, but once too many people at GREEN and RED joined, he felt he had to leave. They simply couldn’t get along any more, as the core value systems, the vmemes, were not working together.

It seems mean to label people, but nevertheless we’re all aware that there’s lots of disagreement in the world. Deep disagreement. So we may as well have some labels that help us understand what we’re dealing with. I’d reject SD if I found something that showed me the labels were just too inaccurate. Good labels are representative labels, they are handy and useful labels. Plus, SD finds that, given 5 or 10 years, people change from one vmeme to another, pretty much depending on their life conditions. So there is still free will and individuality, but there is also a certain amount of obstinate fixation with a particular worldview. People are mostly one vmeme, but it is more like the peak of a wave, so there’s some percentage of other vmemes in there too. Overall you might find a nations population shifting up the spiral, over the decades, as those who were BLUE become ORANGE, and this has implications for party politics.

So what about Sarah? Maybe she is GREEEN. All that talk about human bonding. Maybe perhaps. But we’d need to meet her, preferably, and find out her view on lots of things, to find out what her core vmeme really is. We’ve all been educated, so intellectually we can talk about many fine principles. People can talk all sorts of things, but that doesn’t tell you the core. People revert to the core more clearly when under stress.

The thing I find troubling about the pice by Sarah, is that she is quite careful to list the critics, to show that she is aware of the critics and what they are saying. So far so good, that seems pretty reasonable. But then, without further ado, she dismisses it all. No explanation, no reasoning, no reply. You know what words people usually use when they do that? They use the words “FUCK OFF”.

Suddenly Sarah’s GREEN aspirations for humanistic bonding values start looking more like a RED teenage tantrum.

Truly humanistic values, I would imagine, have at their core a mutual respect for all humans, a respect codified into a social contract, the one where we are all capable of thinking for ourselves. So the real arbiter is not whether you have a bigger club than me (or more members in your movement, more power, or more *cough* consensus), the real arbiter is whether you can make a reasoned argument that shows me to be wrong. I don’t get to say “FUCK OFF”. That would be losing the argument.

Those who hold themselves to that standard, who value reasoning above all else (have it as the core of their worldview) won’t compromise on it. Like the famous quote, “I change my mind, what do you do, Sir?”

I guess what I’m saying is, my reading of Sarah’s article suggests that she is not really as committed to human bonding and respect as she might perhaps believe. The Editors here, smelling bullshit, call her up on it, and debate whether she could possibly mean “humanism” in the same way that the Editors themselves understand it.

That is an especially unproductive criticism. This blog began as the UK government was constructing its climate change legislation and in response to it. The contest between the major parties consisted of language about catastrophe that bore no relationship to the ‘science’ that their arguments were putatively premised on. This blog has been intended as a project which explains environmentalism and its influencing of the political agenda. this was our opening statement:

We believe that an unfounded sense of crisis – and therefore urgency – dominates public discussion of environmental issues. Thus, demands for urgent action to mitigate climate change thrive at the expense of genuine, illuminating, nuanced debate.

The generalisation you seem to be objecting to appears to be our view that humanism and environmentalism are incompatible. You say in reply that environmentalism consists of no more than we ought not ‘foul our own nests’. But as we point out, this doesn’t adequately explain environmentalism, because even climate deniers don’t argue that we should ‘foul our own nests’.

We do not, as you seem to think we do, ever claim that ‘caring for the planet [whatever that is supposed to mean] and being humanist are mutually exclusive’, we argue that environmentalism is something specific, albeit represented by a constellation of claims that are not necessarily consistent.

Here is the key paragraph you need to read again:

This is because there is a fundamental idea operating within environmentalism which is incompatible with humanism. It proposes that our principle relationship is not with each other, but with the natural world. Accordingly, ‘duty to each other’ exists principally as a duty to the planet, and ’societal cohesiveness’ comes from without humanity, being predicated on a sustainable relationship with the natural world. In other words, human relationships are – and must be – mediated by the ‘environment’. These precepts operate prior to the humanist ethic that Burnside attempts to claim for the green movement: humanism is delimited by environmentalism. A failure to recognise these environmental precepts is, according to environmentalists, equivalent to wanting to destroy humanity in an environmental catastrophe.

It seems that you do not want us to ‘generalise’ the philosophical premises of the environmental movement. But if one cannot generalise, one cannot do philosophy, much less any kind of analysis. The consequence is that environmentalism has no characteristics which we’re allowed to identify – because you’d reject any attempt to locate its characteristics. Of course there are degrees to which individual arguments within the environmental movement hold with its premises. But nonetheless, humans stand in relation to their environment in many political philosophies. ‘Metabolically’ in Marx’s view. Malthus had a slightly different conception, in which humans were disciplined by natural processes. In later environmental ideas, the environment is the nexus of social relationships – moral actions are transmitted through the biosphere, rather than directly as actions, or otherwise through social structures.

If environmentalism consists of no more than an impulse to not ‘foul our own nests’ then it is inconsequential. What is at issue is what is consequential. i.e., to what extent this impulse creates ideas about how to avoid ‘fouling our own nests’, and responds to ideas that we are fouling our own nests. Some proportionality is called for. A dogmatic conception of the impulse might come into conflict with improving our own nests. For instance, we have argued that it is possible to conceive of melting ice caps as a problem, but a problem which may better handled by adapting to, rather than avoiding – the benefits of industrial society may outweigh the costs. So what sense can we make of the desire not to ‘foul our own nests’ then? clearly, it’s not an impulse that sustains a coherent and self-consistent meaning.

So your plea that we ‘avoid such simplistic generalisations’ seems to be turned 180 degrees. You have yourself generalised environmentalism into something completely nebulous and simplistic.

The alternative is to pigeonhole and generalize, thereby setting up a strawman to attack. You did this in the main piece and you did it again with me: I didn’t write that everyone else is in the invisible hand mob nor did i suggest businessmen can’t be green, nor do i deride businessmen – I am one. These invisible hand cultists are merely one small vocal group of economists who have been recently very dominant in the worlds financial institutions. And look where that dogma led us: It has done far more harm than good to everyone, employees and businessmen large and small. Yes the dogma of CO2 mitigation might do the same but it’s not the only business destroying philosophy in town.

You (and JMW) posit an idea that caring for the planet and being humanist are mutually exclusive. But this idea only exists in your minds because you are defining green as implicitly anti-industry. If instead you were to define green as making sure that industry cleans its own mess then a green planet is undeniably good for humans because we utterly depend on what the planet gives to us.

That is not to say that individual green spokemen are always correct, or even always sane. My plea is merely that we avoid such simplistic generalisations and strawmen so we don’t end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Try and see the good in people instead and if they are misguided then try to guide them.

But apart from individuals, what about groups? As a whole, we can discern certain worldviews common to certain groups.

We know about religious people, we know about people hwo vote Left, we know about people who vote Right…. but are there more worldviews than just these few?

One model (Spiral Dynamics) has detected about 7 or 8 worldviews (detected in the sense that you can test people with a questionnaire) and these are common across the world.

Now the question is, which worldview are the greens? However, we could then end up arguing about what is the “real” or “central” environmental perspective, or we could step back and just say that, given we know there are 8 major worldviews, then we know there are 8 major takes or perspectives on the environment.

The number of each really just depends on the percentage of the population that belongs to each worldview.

As it happens, in the Spiral Dynamics model, most of these worldviews despise any other worldview except its own.

So I guess all I’m driving at, is that the Editors here may be mistaking the entire green movement as belonging to one worldview, when actually any of the 8 worldviews could approach the problem of the environment in its own way, and perhaps you’re mistaking “traditional environmentalism” for one particular worldview also.

(Spiral Dynamics doesn’t have to be the model, there are others, but the point is that there are multiple major worldviews, and each approaches the environment from its own perspective.)

The only perspective I’m trying to add here is that we hold in mind the existence of multiple perspectives out there. When someone says, “i’m an environmentalist”, the first question is, OK, which worldview are you (using right now) ?

Even if someone claims they are a Humanist, the first question is, which perspective or worldview are you coming from in your approach to Humanism? Are you a Humanist because your parents were and in your worldview, you value what your family and peers and authorities say? Or are you a humanist because in your perspective, the most important thing is to provide rational arguments independently through out, and hence you chose Humanism (but could equally have chosen to join Buddhism or modern Evangelical groups)?

See, the perspective or worldview is a layer deeper than the surface. That’s why it can seem like I’m talking about “ulterior motives”, whereas what I’m talking about is the underlying canvas.

Sorry this is a long post again, but I think it is great that the Editors here are questioning what environmentalists say, I just think that without taking it into including questions about multiple worldviews, the debate gets messy.

See, people with the same worldview can on the surface appear to belong to different groups, like environmentalists and evangelicals, but because they share the same underlying worldview, they’ll soon hook up and see “eye to eye” (worldview to worldview). Meanwhile, two people who each think they are humanists, could when they start talking, discover they can’t quite agree on what it means to be a humanist, because underneath they’re actually coming from two different worldviews.