GOING GREEN

It seems everyone these days is going green, or am I just wearing my Oz glasses? Perhaps the wizard is about to pop out and make the world a better place, but even he will not remove my cynicism.

Some things however are hard to knock, and I have only good words for a new book out by Sheherazade Goldsmith, wife of Zac, who is known for his work at the Ecologist. The cover is featured right (so I could save time typing in the lenghty title). It is very spot on, though it seems to have greatly upset George Monbiot last week in his Guardian piece. Methinks he did protest too much, as there are 90 projects here and whether someone lives on a sheep farm or in a bedsit there is something for everyone in this tome. Maybe even he could roll up his sleeves and get to work instead of inundating us with innacuracies. He also tried to sneak out the back door on the global warming issue, rather than saying he was wrong, or listening to Piers Corbyn, whose letter appeared the next day in the same paper. Corbyn gave us his previous predictions, facts on which they were based, and future predictions. According to him, this year and next will get colder, and there will be more storms this summer. The Big Green Gathering will be mostly spared these storms, if he is correct, and I hope he is as sloshing around in the mud with the madding crowd in Somerset is not my idea of fun, or even how to save the planet. I am to hold forth on hemp on Friday, 8:30 pm in the Moon Marquee, so if Corbyn is spot on we will be high and dry.

When I called around to the environment editors in the UK to invite them, they all seemed to know nothing about the Big Green or Mr. Corbyn (except for John Vidal of the Guardian). So tens of thousands of people will be speaking in the woods, but there will quite likely be a mainstream press blackout, with the left trying desperately to ignore anyone who questions global warming, just as they did when they were all global cooling experts. From the right, expect lots of stories about drunk rich kids and journalists killing each other in helicopters as they try to follow drunk rich kids, and from the left, expect lots of know-it-alls claiming that we are freezing this summer due to global warming.

Somewhere in the middle there are a number of people who just want facts and are working on growing hemp and using electric cars. The next political movement may well be the Centrist Party, fed up with all the nonsense on the far left and far right. They will be carrying copies of genuine peer reviewed articles on hemp, climate change and sustainable living. The 'Green Party' ought to take note and expect a rebuke from me this Friday. Unless I get thrown out first for speaking the truth by the hard core global warming Nazis.