Deputy Ecolo or the Senator from Hope
In a parallel universe, les Verts are conducting their primary for the 2007 presidential in a three-week long mail-in ballot, and on the ballot are Yves Cochet, Député de Paris (14ème arrondissement, my old neighborhood), and Dominique Voynet, Sénatrice de la Seine-Saint-Denis (Ile-de-France). Cochet is the ecologist, a "noniste" and in the "décroissance" (anti-growth) camp. Voynet was also a "noniste" on the neo-liberal European Constitution. He's got "work". She's got "hope". That's an interesting choice.
As I wrote last October, in Shades of Green, Cochet is far and away the better candidate. He's also a mathematican working as a programmer, and got started in the aunti-nukes, which makes him look pretty good as the "candidat de l'écologie politique" to me.
He's written two books, "Sauver la terre" (2003) and "Petrole apocalypse" (2005), and he's been running competitive campaigns for over a decade, getting elected to the Rennes city council, Deputy from Val d'Oise, and Minister of the Environment. I hope to read these (hint to well-heeled readers), but he's posing the $60/bbl-plus petro-economy question, and neither the RNC nor the DNC strategists are looking beyond incremental +/- deltas in CAFE standards, which should zero out the share price and head count of all American auto makers, regardless of political affiliation.
The Greens, and the Dems, in the US, need to think though our post-{2000|2004} electoral issues, and whether, and how, sustainable development planks exist in our parties platforms. That is why what happens inside the ecologist movement in France matters in North America. Either we see the needle or we maintain the illusion, at whatever cost, that there is no needle. We in Maine have that choice too in the present weeks. I'm voting for Chris Miller, he's got a program. John Baldacci offers hope, but hope alone, hope without work is unsatisfactory.