I’m heartily sick of being badgered day and daily, to save the world. I suppose because I am writing this, I am also badgering, but I hope that I am treading slightly newer ground, and putting a more considered approach to the problem, than an awful lot of the stuff we are asked to swallow, by all those riding on another bandwagon, the Green Machine – the politicians, the journalists, the quasi-scientists, the manufacturers, the salesmen, and the sincerely concerned, many of whom have their own axe to grind.
I think the condition can be summed up by the understandable way in which vast numbers of Eastern Europeans, at some expense and great discomfort, are tracking across Europe to what they think is the source of a higher standard of living and a nest egg to give them a new start when they get home again. Now expand this principle on a worldwide basis, and you discover that nations with large, impoverished, populations have the same desire, but their approach is different. The introduction of satellite, communication, also means the introduction of advertising, TV and the introduction to a way of life many will not have seen before, and could not have imagined. Having seen it from mud huts in the jungles, the paddy fields, and in shop windows, there is an insatiable urge for self-improvement. This has presented itself in different ways. In places like Borneo it has meant hacking down the forests, burning and destroying, to provide farming, to earn money, to buy the products and attain the lifestyle that they see on TV. In places like India and China it is the governments who are raping the world to raise the standard of the elite in the first place, and then the rest of the nation. It is my humble opinion that until these aims are achieved across the globe, the Green Machine will basically be nothing more than rhetoric, a political football, the source of income for chancers, material for journalists, designers and manufacturers, with little hope of actually making very much difference, because the damage has already been done.
Instead of using the Green Machine as a basis for dubious increases in tax, of curbing our way of life, and all the things that I have listed above, there should be a serious worldwide policy of how we can internationally combine, to combat further damage on a sensible scientific basis, rather than these ad hoc tickles at the problem. Some of the proposed housing, for example, is so hideous in design, and yet being applauded because it is green, is one demonstration of the rush to be the first rather than the best.
When you’ve read this, of course you will consider it could be purely a gut reaction. Let me assure you, that while I know that I am a voice crying in the wilderness, I have in fact thought long and hard about the problem and am totally frustrated at the way I feel that I am being led by my nose, rather than by honest scientifically based, reasoned analysis, in-depth. Governments ignored the warnings given by scientists over decades if not generations. They are in power all the time the electorate is in a happy mood, so they find it difficult to feed their voters a really bitter pill. It is easier to appear to be caring, than to really care.
A lovely recent example, according to what I heard on TV yesterday, is the fact that our PM is prepared to give the Labour Party a free vote on the use of animal embryos as long as it doesn’t upset the status quo. Just how free is that?