Minorities and Green Political Thought : Normative challenges to an ideal ethics?

National and ethnic minorities are increasingly becoming participants in the quest to protect the Earth. To the Zapatistas in Mexico, the destruction of the jungle for oil extraction and large-scale logging were some of the core issues that motivated their freedom movement. Native Americans in other parts of the Western hemisphere are known for a moral concern for the Earth that provides for more natural management of the environment than any environmental agency could muster. German minority farmers in Denmark have taken the lead in bringing Danish agriculture into the organic realm as well as in creating bio-energy. In Germany, an environmental wing of the Danish minority has created a grass-root organization following the “think globally, act locally” mantra of the new environmental movements. Indeed, in Northern Italy, a member of the Green party has proposed an entirely different type of minority, not defined by ethnicity or allegiance to a nation but by the biosphere that it inhabits, the Alps. In other words, in action and perhaps ontologically, minorities are being redefined along the lines of Green ideas and ecological characteristics