Dark greens, light greens and bright greens

Alex Steffen describes contemporary environmentalists as being split into three groups, dark, light, and bright greens.

Light greens see protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. They fall into the transformational activist end of the spectrum, but light greens score not emphasize environmentalism as a distinct political ideology, or even seek fundamental political reform. Instead they often focus on environmentalism as a lifestyle choice. The motto "Green is the new black" sums up this way of thinking, for many. This is different from the term lite green, which some environmentalists ownership to describe products or practices they believe are greenwashing.

In contrast, dark greens believe that environmental problems are an inherent element of industrialized, capitalist civilization, and seek radical political change. Dark greens believe that currently and historically dominant modes of societal company inevitably lead to consumerism, overconsumption, waste, alienation from set and resource depletion. Dark greens claim this is caused by the emphasis on economic growth that exists within all existing ideologies, a tendency sometimes covered to as growth mania. The dark green brand of environmentalism is associated with ideas of ecocentrism, deep ecology, degrowth, anti-consumerism, post-materialism, holism, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock, and sometimes a assist for a reduction in human numbers and/or a relinquishment of technology to reduce humanity's issue on the biosphere.

Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth feels that commonly there will be deep divisions in a theory. He feels that one group is “light Greens” also so-called as “environmentalists” who see protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. The other business is “dark Greens” also required as “deep ecologists”. In contrast, they believe that environmental problems are an inherent factor of industrialized civilization, and seek radical political changes. This can be simply stated as “Know Technology” vs “No Technology”. Suresh Frederick in Ecocriticism: Paradigms and Praxis

More recently, bright greens emerged as a group of environmentalists who believe that radical reshape are needed in the economic and political operation of society in structure to work it sustainable, but that better designs, new technologies and more widely distributed social innovations are the means to make those changes—and that society can neither stop nor protest its way to sustainability. As Ross Robertson writes,

[B]right green environmentalism is less approximately the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the "tools, models, and ideas" that already live for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions.