The progress of green movement in Thailand

After our first green political conference in 1995, there has been remarkable progress in our movement:

February 1995, Mr. Sulak Sivaraksa used his Alternative Nobel prize to set up an alternative college called SEM (Spirit in Education Movement) to promote holistic ideas and one of the main courses of SEM is Green Politics.


July 1996, Face the Environment, a weekly TV program presented series on green politics 4 weeks continuously. The first was on the green movement worldwide, the second and third were lessons from the Greens in Germany and the last was about a development strategy for such a party in Thailand. This serie was produced with many help of Greens in Germany, USA, Canada and New Zealand. Now I'm distributing 70 copies of it to the NGO's and grassroots organisations throughout the country.

The latest event was the SEM green course held between 12-13 April 1997. The lecturer was Ilana Eldridge, founder of the Northern Territory Green Party under the heading "Green politics in practice: learning from the Australian Greens".
The course content included what's the green party and why it's important, how the Australian greens work, consensus decision, media strategy and should Thailand have a Green party.

The last topic was widely discussed. It looked like everyone agreed that having a Green party should benefit the social and environmental movement because trying to solve many social and environmental problems separately only in local level will never achive, so there should be a movement to work toward changes in social, economic and political structure. This movement should base on a new philosophy, culture and life-style also, and the Green party would be one of the most important arms of this new movement.

The next and largest discuss question was "Are we ready for setting up a Green party right now?". Some said "NO" to this question for the reason that "the grassroots movement was not strong enough yet" and if there was a party it would suppress development of grassroots movement because most of resources, energy and attention might focus at the party.


Another interesting argument was that the green philosophy was not widely understood enough, although our Buddhist philosophy was so close to the green (in my opinion, many points were more obvious and more appropriate for Thai people, but to mix them to the new one should be our hard work).


The support reason was having such party should spark up the whole progressive movement and drew most attention to more structural issue, the new direction of social-economic policy should be discussed and spread throughout the society.

Anyway, this issue didn't reach any conclusion yet.

If we agree to started up a Green party then "How" was the next question. There were 2 ways proposed, one was proposed by the acting chairman of the old Buddhist based "PhalangDham Party" who was also in the seminar, he proposed to reform his own party into green but some thought this was inappropriate because this party was built up from the other philosophy-ideology and almost all the member wasn't held on the green idea yet.

Many want the Green party to be set up from the NGO's not the politician but it seemed we couldn't find NGO's who want to play the politician role.

One obvious point was we all agree that if there would be a Green party in Thailand in the future it should be a good mixture of western green ideas and our own Buddhist culture so it could act appropriately in our social context.

Any comment is welcome,