Environmental campaigners will face backlash with their hardline attitude to energy
15th January 2008
At the New Year, a food company called Whole Earth released the findings of a poll which found that two-thirds of respondents were baffled by the terms ’sustainable’ and ‘genetically modified’ and almost half thought that ‘macrobiotic’ meant a type of bacteria - I won’t sneer because I had to look it up too, Nick Cohen comments in The Observer.
Perhaps the general confinement of green thinking to the comfortably off is unavoidable. Maybe people can only worry about the environment when they are not worried about how to make their pay last until the end of the week. It’s certainly easier to live off organic food if you have a comfortable income and to recycle if you can afford a house with a garden for a compost heap. But even if the rich have greater scope to be greener than the poor, the possibility that the momentum behind the environmental movement will dissipate with a crash is exacerbated by the failure of its leaders to think hard enough about how the policies they recommend hit those in straitened circumstances.
