Alliance 90 / Green Realm

Alliance 90 / Green Realm, ordinarily the Greens, is the ecological party of the United Kingdom of America. It holds 25 of 460 seats in the House of Commons, having lost thirteen at the general election of 7 September 2028, and it is now one of the five parties of the Whitlock ministry. It was previously a junior partner in Ana Valdez’s coalition with the Labour and Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Federal Democrats. It has never formed a ministry. Its leader, Naomi Feldt, is Lord President of the Council in the Whitlock ministry, with the Environment attached to the office, the party’s one seat in the Cabinet; Lena Whitefeather is Minister for Treaty Relations, a minister of state outside it.

The party’s central idea is the trust: that some things are held rather than owned, that a trustee may use but not exhaust them, and that this is a principle of the Realm’s own law rather than an ecological import. It points to the Royal American Parks System, which holds the Realm’s great landscapes in trust rather than owning them, and to the chartered public trusts over land, water and minerals, and argues that the Realm worked out the correct relationship to its own territory a century ago and then stopped applying it.

This makes the Greens a claimant on an inheritance rather than a challenger to it. The conservation settlement was built by Theodore Roosevelt’s ministry, a Liberal Federal Democrat one, and given the language of permanence by Ernest III. The Greens’ argument is that the party which created it lost interest, that the Conservative and Crown Union merely administers it, and that the tradition now belongs to whoever will extend it.

The Greens are the only party with a stated position on the western water crisis, and the position has been splitting them for a decade. The general election of 2028 did not split them along the line everybody expected. The party had braced to lose the rural irrigation seats its water policy threatened, and held them; it lost instead its city and university seats, to the Left and Solidarity Bloc, over Loreto. It is now a party whose urban majority wrote a water policy that its rural minority is the only part of it the voters rewarded.

Name

The name records a merger and the party has kept both halves for the same reason the LSDP kept both of its own: neither predecessor would disappear into the other.

Green Realm was the ecological party, founded in 1974. The second word was contested at the time and was chosen deliberately. Its founders held that the Realm’s monarchy already contained the idea they were arguing for, since the Crown holds land it cannot sell, and that a green party in this country should stand inside that tradition rather than outside it. Critics on the ecological left called the name deferential, and some still do.

Alliance 90 was not an ecological body at all. It was the civic coalition that formed in 1990 out of the campaign to defend the public trusts and the Parks System against a series of proposals to sell or convert them, and it brought together trust beneficiaries, municipal bodies, hunting and angling associations, ranchers, university lawyers, Indigenous organisations and a considerable number of people who had never been on the left in their lives. It was a defensive alliance and it won.

The two organisations cooperated through the early 1990s and merged in 1996. The oblique stroke in the name is exact: the party is a compound and has never pretended otherwise.

Ordinary usage is the Greens, and the party’s emblem and campaign material have said only “The Greens” since the 2000s. The full name appears in the party constitution, on ballot papers and in the polity organisations, which style themselves in full, as in Alliance 90 / Green Realm of Wisconsin. In the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi the party organises, like the Realm’s other parties, under a Hawaiian name that nobody translates.

History

The conservation inheritance

The Realm’s conservation settlement was made in the great reform decades of the early twentieth century under Theodore Roosevelt’s ministry, against enormous commercial pressure, at a moment when railways could reach anything and mining and timber had shown they could take anything. The argument the conservationists won was that a country which sold every acre of itself would have nothing left to be a country. Ernest III gave the result the language of permanence, and the Royal American Parks System has held the great landscapes in trust ever since.

The Greens did not make this settlement and do not claim to have. What they claim is that no party has extended it in a century. The LFD, which made it, turned its attention to the machinery of government; Labour, which built the reform state, regarded the land as somebody else’s subject; and the CCU administered the parks with care and the trusts with suspicion. By the 1970s the settlement was a set of institutions without a party.

Green Realm, 1974

The ecological party was founded in 1974 by conservation societies, university scientists and urban campaigners concerned with air and water pollution, pesticides and the loss of habitat outside the protected landscapes. Its early argument was that the Parks System had protected the spectacular and left everything else unguarded, and that a trust principle which applied only to scenery was not a principle.

Its first leader was Barry Commoner, a biologist from the Province of New York who had spent the 1960s explaining to the Realm what nuclear testing and synthetic chemistry were doing to its milk, its rivers and its lakes, and who brought to the new party a scientist’s patience and a scientist’s conviction that the evidence would eventually win. It returned no members to the Commons for its first decade and built instead in municipal government and in the polity legislatures, where the mixed-member system’s polity top-up and absent threshold gave a small party its first seats.

The party’s first decade was also its most divided. The founders included people who wanted a party of the ecological left and people who wanted a party of conservation, and they argued about the name, the Crown, nuclear power and whether to stand for the Commons at all. The argument over nuclear power was the bitterest, and the party’s decision in the 1980s to accept the nuclear component of the generation mix, as the price of a credible programme on coal, cost it a good many of its early members. The decision has been settled policy ever since and the party regards it as the moment it became serious.

Its first seats came in the polities. Green Realm won places on the councils of Madison, Cambridge and Berkeley in its first five years, its first seats in the Wisconsin Landtag and the legislature of the Province of Massachusetts Bay at the end of the 1970s, and its first member of the House of Commons at the general election of 1984, from a top-up seat in Massachusetts Bay awarded under the best-loser rule to a candidate who had come second in Cambridge by a few hundred votes. The party regards the best-loser rule as its mother, and its members of the Commons have defended the mixed-member system against every proposal to change it with a loyalty that its other partisans find touching.

Gaylord Nelson, a former Premier of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin who had founded the Realm’s Earth Day in 1970 as a member of another party and joined Green Realm in 1983, led it from 1984 to 1991 and gave it the Wisconsin base it still has. He was the first leader of the party to have governed anything, and the first who could talk to farmers.

Alliance 90 and the trusts

The formative event was not ecological. Through the later 1980s a series of proposals emerged to convert the chartered public trusts into ordinary public corporations, to open the Royal American Parks System’s holdings to commercial leasing, and in the most contested cases to sell trust land outright. The proposals came from within the CCU governments of the period and were advanced on the ground that a trust answerable to no minister was answerable to nobody.

The campaign against them federated in 1990 as Alliance 90, and it was formidable precisely because it was not a party of the left. Its membership included the people who used the trusts: irrigators, graziers, anglers, municipal utilities, university water lawyers and the Indigenous bodies whose claims ran with the land. Its convenor was Hal Beaudry, a cattle rancher from the State of Montana whose family had grazed trust land for three generations and who had voted for the CCU at every election of his life, and its most effective spokesmen were the irrigation district managers who could explain to a Commons committee, in figures, what a commercial lease on their water would cost the farms below the dams.

The alliance was assembled in a hurry and organised with great care. Its founding meeting, in the spring of 1990, brought together more than two hundred organisations, from the irrigation districts of the Snake and the Platte to the municipal water boards of the Pacific cities, the anglers’ and hunters’ associations of the interior, the law faculties that had litigated the trusts’ charters, and the treaty nations whose claims ran with the land, and it agreed on a single sentence of purpose, that what was held in trust should stay held, and on nothing else. It never adopted a programme, never endorsed a candidate in its own name, and never asked any of its members to change their party. It asked them to write to their members of Parliament, and they wrote.

The campaign’s method was evidence. Its organisers understood that the proposals would be decided in the Commons committees and on the CCU’s own back benches, and they sent to the committees not campaigners but the people who ran the trusts and used them: district managers with their allocation ledgers, ranchers with their grazing leases, municipal engineers with their reservoir records, tribal lawyers with their treaties. The committees heard, over two sessions, a body of evidence that the government’s own case could not answer, and the CCU members who sat on them, many of whom represented the districts whose managers were testifying, came out of the hearings unable to vote for the bill.

It defeated the proposals comprehensively. The last of them was beaten in the Commons with a substantial number of the CCU’s own members voting against their government, and the defeat is why the CCU’s settled position today is that the trusts are chartered and local and worth defending. That position was arrived at by losing.

The merger, 1996

Alliance 90 had won its fight and had no further programme; Green Realm had a programme and could not win. The two organisations cooperated through the early 1990s, running joint candidates in a handful of polities and sharing platforms at the general election of 1992, and they merged in 1996 after six years of cooperation, on terms that preserved both names and both memberships. Alliance 90 brought a rural and legal membership the Green Realm had never possessed and has never since replaced. The Green Realm brought an urban and university base, a national organisation and a programme.

The merger agreement divided the party conference into two sections, one for each predecessor, each with its own chair and its own vote on certain questions, as a temporary safeguard until the memberships had grown together. The arrangement has never been removed, the memberships have never entirely grown together, and the two sections still sit on opposite sides of the hall.

Anne Thorvald, a Madison city councillor who had led Green Realm since Nelson’s retirement in 1991, became the merged party’s first leader, with Beaudry as her deputy. She held the leadership for sixteen years, the longest of any Green, and turned the compound into a party: one membership, one programme, one list of candidates, and two sections of a conference that she managed with a diplomacy her successors have never matched.

Into the Commons, 1996 to 2018

The party entered the Commons in numbers through the 1990s and 2000s, holding between twelve and eighteen seats at every general election from 1992 to 2015. It was the small party of the Realm’s politics through the Clinton and Gore ministries, the emergency years and the Obama ministry, with a programme every party respected and a seat count none of them needed. Its members chaired no committees, held no office, and became, by a process the party’s own historians describe as slightly embarrassing, the Commons’ recognised experts on water, land, energy and the trusts, consulted by ministers of every party who did not want to be seen consulting them.

Marcus Wendt of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, an energy economist, succeeded Thorvald in 2007 and set out to make the Greens a party of government. He wrote the party’s coal programme, the negotiated transition of closure schedules joined to renewable construction, grid investment, retraining and income guarantees, which is now the Realm’s policy in all but name, and he took the party into government for the first time, in a coalition government of the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin in the 2010s, in which Green ministers ran the polity’s water and land administration for four years. It was the party’s first experience of office and, by its own account, the most useful. The Wisconsin coalition formed after an election to the Landtag in which no party could command it, and the Greens’ price was the polity’s water and land administration, which they used to put the Grand Duchy’s groundwater under a chartered trust on the Salt River model, to bring the dairy counties’ nitrate runoff under the household minimum, and to buy back, from willing sellers, the first of the riparian strips along the Wisconsin River that the polity now holds in trust. The farmers of the dairy counties did not thank them, and the coalition lost the next election, and the trust, the nitrate rules and the riparian strips all survived the government that made them, which the Greens regard as the definition of success.

The breakthrough and the coalition, 2018 to 2028

The general election of 2018 nearly doubled the party, to 31 seats, on a vote drawn from the cities, the universities and the Pacific coast, and the general election of 2023 raised it to 38, the best result in its history. The party was, for the first time, large enough to matter in a hung Commons, and it was not asked: Thomas Markham’s coalition of 2018 was formed with the LFD alone, and his minority government after 2023 governed without arrangements.

Naomi Feldt, who represents a Grand Duchy of Wisconsin constituency and came into politics through municipal water litigation, succeeded Wendt in 2021. She was the first Green leader to come from the party’s water lawyers rather than from its scientists or its economists, and she made water the party’s first subject: she wrote the policy on the western compacts that no other party would touch, and she took it to the general election of 2023 knowing that it would cost the party its rural seats, and it did not.

When Markham died in October 2025 and Valdez cancelled the election he had called, the Greens were the second of the two parties whose votes a premier nobody had voted for needed, and the price of the cancellation was a coalition. At the four days of talks at Blackjacks in November 2025 the Greens took two portfolios, charter duties for two of the chartered network bodies that hold the Realm’s transmission, and an accelerated grid programme. They did not get the renegotiation of the western compacts, which Labour would not open in a Parliament where its own western members would revolt. It was the ordinary position of a small partner, and the party has never pretended it was more.

In government the Greens did what small partners do: they administered their departments carefully, voted for the ministry’s measures they disliked, and won the arguments they could win inside the Cabinet room without telling anybody. The charter duties for the two network bodies were their work, drafted by Green ministers and carried through the Commons with the coalition’s votes, and they moved the decarbonisation of two of the Realm’s largest transmission networks from ministerial policy into trust obligation, where no future government can reach it without amending a charter. The accelerated grid programme was theirs too. They had no part in the purchase of Loreto, which predated their entry into the government, and a great deal in its consequences: the Greens’ members of the Commons voted with the ministry on Part VI of the Nationality Act through fourteen months in which their own members regarded the territory’s unsettled status as indefensible, and a number of them were among the members who crossed the floor on 26 July. The party’s cities, which had elected those members, judged the record at the general election of 7 September, and judged it harshly.

The coalition fell on 26 July 2028, on a motion of no confidence carried by one vote, and at the general election of 7 September the Greens lost thirteen seats, a third of their strength, for having been in it.

Doctrine

The trust principle

The Greens’ programme is the extension of the trust form to things the Realm has left in ordinary ownership: watersheds, aquifers, coastal margins, old-growth forest, and the carbon budget itself, which the party argues is the clearest case of a resource that can be used and cannot be replaced. It does not propose nationalisation and is explicit that a trust is not a ministry. It wants chartered bodies, locally governed, with published accounts and duties running to future beneficiaries. The Salt River Project, the chartered water trust of the Phoenix valley, is the model the party cites most often, and its manifestos describe the trust it wants for every major watershed in the west in terms taken almost word for word from the Project’s charter.

The position places it alongside the Left and Solidarity Bloc, which defends the same institutions as common property, and alongside the CCU, which defends them as chartered and local. Three parties defend the trusts for three incompatible reasons, and the arrangement has held for thirty years.

The Crown as trustee

The Greens are the only party that takes a positive position on the monarchy, and it is a narrow one. The Crown holds land it cannot sell and is bound by the terms of the holding, which the party regards as the trust principle already operating at the highest level of the constitution. It therefore treats the sovereign as a permanent trustee whose obligations outlast ministries, and it says so.

The party is careful about the difference between this and what Alternative for the Realm asks. The Greens do not call on the Crown to act politically, refuse assent or intervene against a government. They call on it to be what its own instruments already say it is, and their demands are directed at ministers.

The position is not universally held inside the party. The section descended from Alliance 90’s civic membership is comfortable with it. A portion of the ecological left regards the whole formulation as a decorative way of asking permission. In the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, where the Crown’s land is the subject of the whole of politics, the party’s Hawaiian organisation holds the doctrine more completely than the federal party does and draws from it conclusions about the Crown lands of Hawaiʻi that the federal party has been careful not to adopt.

Climate and energy

The Greens support the negotiated coal transition rather than an announced one, on the ground that closure schedules joined to renewable construction, grid investment, retraining and income guarantees are slower and more durable than a federal programme would be. They accept the nuclear component of the generation mix, which cost the party members in the 1980s and is now settled policy.

Their principal federal demand is that the chartered network bodies which hold transmission be given explicit decarbonisation duties in their charters, which would move the transition from ministerial policy into trust obligation and out of the reach of the next election. The Valdez coalition gave two of the network bodies such duties, the party’s most concrete achievement in government, and the Greens want the rest to follow.

The Rights Act

The Greens support extending the enforceable duties of the American Rights Act to income security and say so, which placed them with the LFD and against the silence of the LSDP that led their coalition. Their own interest in the Act is older and more specific: the household water minimum is a Rights Act duty, and it is the instrument that has done more for the party’s programme than any environmental statute. The minimum is not a section of the Act. It was found in section 36 by the Royal American Supreme Court in 1976, in Vondracek, a nitrate case out of Des Moines, which is why the party’s most valuable instrument came out of a polity where its own farming vote has never forgiven it.

Cities, transport and the economy

The Greens’ programme for the cities is less often discussed than their programme for the land and is the one that won them their seats in 2018 and 2023. It wants housing built densely and near transport, the Realm’s suburban zoning loosened, public transport funded as a utility rather than a service, and the cities’ water, power and drainage put under chartered trusts on the same principle as the rivers. Its economic programme is otherwise regulatory and cautious: it wants carbon priced by a schedule announced long in advance, the transition financed by the network bodies’ charters rather than by ministerial grants, and nothing done quickly that could be done durably.

The party has never been a party of growth or of its opposite, and its critics on both sides find it hard to place. The CCU calls it a party of regulation in the name of conservation; the Bloc calls it a party of conservation in the name of regulation. The Greens’ own description is that they are a party of the long term in a Parliament of the next election, and that the trust form is the only instrument the Realm has invented for binding the next election to the long term.

Treaties and the nations

The party’s position on the Realm’s treaty nations was formed by Alliance 90, whose Indigenous members fought beside the irrigators and the ranchers in 1990, and it has always held that the trusts and the treaties are one question: that the land the trusts hold is land the treaties describe, and that a party which wants the land held for those who come after must want the treaties kept with those who were there before. The Greens have supported, at every election since the merger, the nations’ demand that the Minister for Treaty Relations be brought into the Cabinet, and they asked for the office in the Whitlock ministry, against the advice of their own officials, who wanted the Environment.

The nations have objected since 1978 that their affairs are handled by a minister of state who does not sit where the Realm’s decisions are taken, and no ministry has brought the office into the Cabinet. The Greens’ answer, when they took office in 2028, was to take the office as it is, outside the Cabinet, and to give it to the member best able to hold it. Lena Whitefeather is an Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge and a treaty lawyer who argued water cases on behalf of the nations of the Missouri basin for twenty years before she entered Parliament, and she won Bismarck and the Missouri for the party at the general election of 7 September, the party’s only gain anywhere. She is the first minister for Treaty Relations to have argued against the federation in its own courts on the nations’ behalf, and the nations’ governments, which have dealt with a long succession of ministers who knew them only from briefings, have said so with something close to warmth.

The party’s water policy and its treaty policy meet in the Missouri basin, where the nations’ water rights are among the oldest and largest in the west and the irrigation districts’ allocations depend on them. The western associations’ paper of October was written with Whitefeather’s help, which is one reason the federal leadership has not dismissed it.

The Greens and the Conservatives

The party’s oddest relationship is with the CCU, which it defeated in 1990 and from which a good part of its western membership came. The Greens and the CCU agree on more than either admits: on the trusts, which both defend; on the Crown, which both regard with respect and neither wants to enlarge; on the polities, whose autonomy both value; and on the Parks System, whose leasing the CCU proposed in the 1980s and has opposed ever since. They disagree on almost everything else, and especially on water, where the CCU represents the irrigation districts the Greens’ policy asks to give up the most.

In the Whitlock ministry the two parties sit together in a Cabinet for the first time. The Lord President and the CCU’s seven ministers have found, by the accounts of people who have watched them, that they can conduct the business of a Cabinet that may do almost nothing with a civility that surprised both. The CCU’s western associations and the Greens’ western associations, which represent the same irrigation districts from opposite directions, have found nothing of the kind.

Water and the western compacts

The western compacts allocate more water than the rivers now carry. The Rights Act household minimum outranks agricultural and industrial allocation, the courts have applied it, and the irrigation districts have contested it. This is the most serious long-term physical constraint on the Realm’s economy and no party had taken a position on it until the Greens took one.

The party’s position is that the compacts must be renegotiated on the water that exists rather than the water they were drafted for, that the household minimum stands, and that the reduction must fall on the allocations that are largest rather than on those that are most recent. It is the only stated position in the Commons and it is coherent.

It is also splitting the party. The membership Alliance 90 brought in 1990 includes the irrigators and graziers who fought beside it to save the trusts, and they are the people the policy asks to give up water. The party’s western associations have said so in public. Its urban and university majority regards the arithmetic as not negotiable, and the argument between them has been conducted at four conferences without resolution.

The compacts are old instruments. Most were negotiated between the polities of the river basins in the first half of the twentieth century, in decades the hydrologists now regard as unusually wet, and they divided among the polities a flow that the rivers have not carried, on average, for a generation. They were written to settle disputes between polities and they have done so; what they were not written to do is ration a shrinking river, and they contain no mechanism for it. Every reduction since the 1990s has been negotiated case by case, under the pressure of drought, by polity governments each of which has a strong interest in the reduction falling on somebody else.

The household minimum changed the arithmetic. Once the courts held that the Rights Act’s duty to water outranked agricultural and industrial allocation, every polity government in the basins had a legal duty to supply its households first, and the irrigation districts, whose allocations are the largest and in many cases the oldest, found their senior rights subordinated to a duty nobody had legislated. The districts have contested the minimum in the courts for thirty years and lost most of the cases. They have not lost the argument in the countryside, and the Greens’ policy, which accepts the minimum and asks the largest allocations to bear the reduction, asks them to concede the argument as well.

The party’s water policy has a cousin in the litigation over the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Migration Compact, whose validity the State of Wyoming contests before the Royal American Supreme Court, with judgment reserved. The compact attempts to extend the trust over the migration routes outside the park’s boundaries, and the Greens supported it from the first, on the ground that a trust principle that stops at a fence is not a principle. Its outcome will say whether the Realm’s highest court regards the trust as a doctrine that can travel beyond the land it was made for, which is the question on which the party’s whole programme depends.

The leadership declined to soften the policy and said that a party which discovered the arithmetic cannot un-discover it. It expected to lose most of its rural and irrigation-country seats over it, and the party’s own analysts had marked them as lost before the general election of 2028. They were not lost. The western associations, which had campaigned in their own constituencies on their own account of what the policy meant, held every one of them, and in the Dakotas Lena Whitefeather, a treaty lawyer who had argued water cases, won Bismarck and the Missouri for the party for the first time.

Factions

The two sections of the conference are the party’s formal division, but they are not its only one. Its arguments run along three lines that cross the sections and each other.

The conservationists are the party’s inheritance from Alliance 90 and from the older conservation societies of Green Realm: members for whom the party exists to keep land, water and wildlife held in trust, and for whom climate, energy and the Rights Act are means to that end. They are strongest in the interior, the ranching country and the treaty nations, and among the anglers, hunters and landholders who joined the alliance in 1990. They are the most comfortable with the Crown, the most suspicious of federal administration, and the most likely to have voted for another party before they voted Green.

The ecological left is the party’s urban and university membership, strongest in the cities the party lost in 2028, for whom the trust principle is one instrument among several and the party’s business is the transformation of the economy that the climate requires. It wrote most of the coal programme and most of the water policy, it supports the extension of the Rights Act without hesitation, and a portion of it regards the Crown-as-trustee doctrine as a decorative way of asking permission. It is the part of the party that the Bloc’s 2028 campaign was most successful in reaching, and the part most argued over since.

The administrators are the smallest group and the most influential: the party’s ministers, from the Wisconsin government of the 2010s to the Valdez coalition and the Whitlock ministry, and the polity members who have sustained minority governments on published terms. They hold that the Greens’ programme is best advanced by occupying the offices that administer the trusts and the transmission network, and that a small party which governs well is more use than a large one which protests well. Wendt was one of them, and so is Feldt.

Organisation

Leadership and the two sections

The party retains a federal structure of polity organisations styled in full, and elects its leader by a vote of the membership. Its distinctive internal feature is the formal division of the party conference into sections descended from the two predecessor bodies, the Green Realm section and the Alliance 90 section, an arrangement adopted at the merger as a temporary safeguard and never removed. Each section elects its own chair; a motion that changes the party’s policy on land, water or the trusts must carry in both; and the leader is elected by the whole membership but conventionally names a deputy from the other section.

The sections no longer correspond neatly to the predecessors. The Green Realm section is the party of the cities, the universities and the Pacific coast; the Alliance 90 section is the party of the interior, the irrigation districts, the ranching country and the treaty nations, and it contains a good many members whose families joined the alliance in 1990 and who have never thought of themselves as ecologists at all. The water policy passed the Green Realm section easily and the Alliance 90 section narrowly, at the third attempt, which is the origin of the present division.

The Joint Conference

The Joint Conference meets each autumn in a university city, in two sections that sit separately in the mornings and together in the afternoons. It adopts the party’s programme, elects the national executive and the section chairs, and hears the leader, and it is the most argumentative of the six parties’ annual meetings and, by general agreement, the most enjoyable.

Headquarters, membership and money

The national office is in Madison, in the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin, where Green Realm was strongest when the merger took place and where Thorvald, Nelson and Feldt all began, and the party keeps a small office in New Westminster for its parliamentary staff. It has about 70,000 members, younger than any party but Alternative for the Realm and considerably better educated than any of the six. Its finances are modest and drawn largely from members rather than institutions; unlike the LFD it accepts donations from bodies, and unlike Labour and the Bloc it has no affiliates.

The party’s quarterly is The Watershed, founded by Alliance 90 in 1991 as a newsletter for irrigation districts and ranchers and kept by the merged party under its old title, which the urban section has twice proposed to change and the Alliance 90 section has twice refused.

Electoral support

The Greens are strongest in the university cities, on the Pacific coast, and in urban Wisconsin, where the party is described as environmentalist, urban and university-adjacent, and in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose policy-literate provincial politics suit it. Their safest ground anywhere is the island of Kauaʻi, in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, which has made restraint into policy.

The party is weakest in the industrial commonwealths, where the LSDP holds the ground, and on the Gulf. Its rural vote, concentrated in irrigation country and inherited from Alliance 90, was the part of its support the party’s own water policy was expected to dismantle; in 2028 it was the part that held.

The party’s voters are the youngest of any party’s but AfR’s, the most educated of all six, and the most likely to live in a city and work in a profession, a university or the public service; and, in the west, a second electorate entirely, older, rural and conservative in most things, that votes Green because Alliance 90 saved the land it works and has never forgotten it. The two electorates have almost nothing in common but the party, and the party’s strategists have spent thirty years trying to write manifestos that both can read.

The Greens in the polities

The party is a serious force in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi as it is nowhere else in the Realm, because land, water and reef are the whole argument there; Labour and the Conservatives alternate in government, and the Greens’ Hawaiian organisation, under its untranslated Hawaiian name, has made a visitor levy its central demand and has not yet won the argument. Kauaʻi, which has the strictest building limits in the Kingdom, the lowest visitor numbers by deliberate choice and the strongest conservation law, and a settled decision not to become Maui, is the party’s model of what a polity governed on the trust principle would look like, and the federal party’s literature has used photographs of it for twenty years. The Kingdom’s Crown lands, held in trust under the Treaty of Honolulu, are the party’s other model, and the Hawaiian organisation’s view of them is more radical than the federal party’s: it holds that the trust’s beneficiaries are the Hawaiian people and that the revenue the Crown lands pay into the Kingdom’s budget is a trust distribution, which the federal party has never adopted and has never repudiated. In the Province of Connecticut the party supplies confidence and budget support under a published agreement to Elena Rosario’s LFD minority coalition while retaining freedom on other legislation, the arrangement it proposed for the federation in 2025; in the Province of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations it supports Labour’s minority ministry. It has governed once, in Wisconsin, and has spent most of its polity life in this position, sustaining other parties’ minority governments from outside on published terms, which its members regard as the purest form of the trust principle applied to politics.

Electoral record

The Greens’ seats at the general elections since 1992, in a Commons of 460 seats in which a majority is 231. The figure for 1992 is Green Realm’s; Alliance 90 did not contest separately.

The party was in government from November 2025, in the Valdez coalition, without an election between.

Leaders

Identity

The party’s colours are two greens, a dark forest green and a light leaf green, and have been since the merger, when the two predecessors’ colours, Green Realm’s leaf and Alliance 90’s forest, were combined rather than chosen between. Its emblem, a three-leaved seedling rising from spreading roots inside an open ring, was adopted in the 2000s and is read by the party as the trust itself: something planted by people who will not see it grown, held for people who are not yet born.

The party has no anthem and has argued at three conferences about whether to have one. Its slogan since the merger has been “Held in trust”, printed on every membership card and on the banners of the Joint Conference, and it is the only party slogan in the Realm that is also a legal term.

The party at present

The Greens hold 25 seats. They held 38 and two portfolios in the Valdez coalition, and lost a third of their strength for having been in it.

The seats they lost were not the seats they expected to lose. The party’s analysts had marked the rural and irrigation-country seats as the casualties of the water policy, and every one of them held, on the western associations’ own campaigns; in the Dakotas the party gained Bismarck and the Missouri for the first time. What it lost were thirteen seats in the university cities and the urban cores of Wisconsin, Massachusetts Bay and the Pacific coast, almost all of them to the Left and Solidarity Bloc, whose candidates campaigned against the Valdez coalition’s handling of Loreto and took the young urban voters who had made the Greens’ breakthrough of 2018 and 2023. The party’s urban section, which wrote the water policy and expected the west to pay for it, lost the election; its western section, which opposed the policy and expected to lose, did not.

The split is unresolved but organising. In October the party’s western associations met on their own, for the first time since the merger, at a gathering in Pierre in the State of the Dakotas, and published a water policy of their own: the household minimum stands, the compacts are renegotiated, but the reduction is shared across all the allocations rather than falling on the largest, and the irrigation districts are compensated from federal funds for what they give up. The policy is not the party’s, and the western associations have not said that it should replace the party’s. Nobody has left the party and nobody has been expelled. The leadership has said that the Joint Conference will consider the western paper in the ordinary way, and the western associations have said that they will be there.

In the Whitlock ministry Feldt is Lord President of the Council, the party’s one seat in the Cabinet, and under the schedule to the Heads of Agreement the Lord President carries the Environment, which the party asked to be attached to the office so that its leader would sit in Cabinet with a department rather than without one. Lena Whitefeather, an Oglala Lakota of Pine Ridge, is Minister for Treaty Relations, a minister of state outside the Cabinet. The party asked for Treaty Relations rather than a second Cabinet seat, which surprised every other party, on the ground that the trusts and the treaties are one question and that a party which had argued for thirty years that the office belonged in the Cabinet should hold it while it did not.

The ministry’s business is limited by its agreement to Loreto, supply and very little else, and the Greens can do almost nothing with the Environment but administer it. They have used the office to publish, for the first time, the department’s own assessment of what the western compacts allocate against what the rivers carry, which the party regards as the most useful thing it could do in a Parliament in which it can legislate nothing. When the abdication of Ernest V came before the Commons the party took it with the other five, without a division, and said what they said; after the earthquake of 2 November it said the same things as everybody else.

Feldt is safe, and this Parliament is her last as leader. She told the party so in September, the week after the agreement was signed: the water policy is hers, she intends to see it through the Parliament and to the next general election, and she will not trade it for the western associations’ paper or for anything else. No candidate to succeed her has declared, and the party’s conversation about the succession, which has begun, is conducted mostly about which section the next leader should come from.

The party’s difficulty is that its two strongest positions point in opposite directions. Its support for extending the Rights Act aligns it with the LFD against the silence of its former senior partner. Its water policy aligns it with nobody at all, and cost it, in the event, nothing in the places that were supposed to pay for it and a great deal in the places that wrote it. Neither has been resolved, and the leadership has not attempted to trade one for the other.

Its Cascadian members found a new cause on 9 November 2028. Maren Lindqvist, a Green member for a Cascadian seat, was among the five who brought in Joseph Many Horses’s bill for a convention to write a new Charter keeping the Crown, and asked that the environment be written into it, as the Dakotas had written it into theirs the day before. Lena Whitefeather, the party’s minister for the treaty nations, was in the chamber for the speech and said nothing. See The Convention Bill.

Trivia

See also

• Royal American Parks System, the conservation inheritance the party claims
• Economy of the United Kingdom of America, the chartered public trusts and the western water constraint
• Left and Solidarity Bloc, which defends the same trusts as common property, and took the Greens’ city seats in 2028
• Conservative and Crown Union, whose 1990 defeat produced its present defence of the trusts
• Labour and Social Democratic Party, the senior partner that would not open the compacts
• Treaty Nations, whose minister the party holds
• American Rights Act, whose household water minimum is the party’s most effective instrument
• Salt River Project, the chartered water trust the party treats as the working model

Alliance 90 / Green Realm · Political Parties · Institutions & Government · United Kingdom of America