For students of politics, the state has always assumed central importance.

However, for many in the Green movements, and the Green theorists articulating their concerns in a more abstract or systematic manner, the importance of the state has often been understated.

In part this is because of the ‘personal is political’ element in Green politics - with a more all embracing conception of politics than held by many more conventional theories or by many involved in the academic study of politics. Thus one often finds in Green politics an extremely broad understanding of the scope of ‘green’ politics that encompasses essentially everything one does, from one’s choices about consumption, transport, wastes, fertility, and so on. Often these are presented in such broad terms that they can be viewed as ‘pre-political’, or as simply too big, urgent and important for ‘politics’ and political activism. This is either presented in the sense that Green politics is about issues of ecological survival which make ‘politics’ irrele­vant, or that the real ‘cause’ of the ‘ecological crisis’ is ‘beyond politics’ and has to do with ‘deeper’ dynamics of the ecologically destructive consciousness and ignorance of humanity and/or the spiritual malaise of modernity (as in ‘deep ecology’, e.g. Devall 1988: 160; Naess 1995: 261). Greens thus vacillate between a ‘common sense’ account of politics as the dirty machinations for state power and thus to be avoided, and one which is an all-encompassing facet of life. Either way, the state doesn’t get much serious attention.

In part this neglect is also because of the ‘neither left nor right’ element in Green movements, which is ‘anti-political’ and eschews serious discussion of central elements of politics in favour of ideological exhortations concerning the ‘common interests of humanity’ - humans should be seen not so much as citizens, workers, etc., but as ‘plain members’ of the ‘land community’ (Leopold 1949).

So there has been an undercurrent of attitudes to the state amongst Greens, and occasional articulations by Green theorists, which permit an elaboration of a green theory, or perhaps more precisely a range of green theories of the state. The debate amongst (some) Greens has moreover become more clearly articulated in the last decade, and it is possible to discern a shift in orientation to and mode of analysis of the state by Greens. This chapter attempts to delineate the terrain of this debate. The first part details the sorts of critiques of the state that Greens have engaged in. We then interrogate the claim that this amounts to green theory being an anarchist theory of the state. The third part looks at recent attempts in green theory to go beyond the ‘for/against’ way of approaching the state and to look at the way the state is being recon­structed, and could be further reconstructed, in response to ecological concerns.