Radically Green

Image from Foreign Policy

About a week ago, I wrote about the film First Reformed and its depiction of how someone can be radicalised in the face of irreversible environmental damage. Away from the silver screen, this may be shaping up to become a reality.

A recent article from The Guardian focused on people who are willing to go to prison in the name of environmental activism, which made me wonder how this will evolve once the consequences of climate change are in full swing. With each coming news article, the future does not seem bright. Piece after piece on how it may be too late for humanity to reduce or stop further warming, how the majority of the world's vertebrate species have been made extinct in the last few decades, and how our actions may lead to the next megafaunal extinction: ourselves. This is more than enough to lower the optimism of any reader; the reports are seemingly endless.

Environmental extremism appears to be a likely potential outcome in the future. The overwhelming reports, along with it having already happened, is what makes it so likely that radicalisation will massively increase in the coming decades. Radicalisation is a process where a person increasingly moves their views from mainstream to extreme, ultimately leading to them to accept violence as a means to achieve a political goal.

Here's a video from adelphi, which delves into this topic: