NEWS AND VIEWS

A story by Janet Cromley of the LA Times caught my eye today, click here to read. For some reason it is listed as being in the Cincinnati Post, so maybe they ran it. Easier than doing your own article on the subject I guess. The piece talks about all the hemp foods, hemp sauce, hemp tortillas, etc, that are on sale at Whole Foods in California. It then goes on to describe the nutritional benefits, and Cromley evidently did spend time researching and getting it right. Well done.

Here in the UK the front page of the Evening Standard also caught my eye, and set me back one of those heptagonal pieces of change I'd rather give to other causes, but the story was about the bag wars, so I parted with 50p. The local councils, led by Merrick Cockell (Tory leader of the London Councils organisation) want to charge people 10p as a tax on plastic bags - and one wonders if the diplomats at the US Embassy who refuse to pay the London congestion charge can legally avoid this as it is, or would be, officially a tax; the congestion charge is a service charge, from which only lunatics (by some 12th century statute) are exempt. If enacted it would greatly reduce the use of plastic bags. It is set to go for debate before MPs in November, and I think it is a good idea. Such a tax has led to a 90% drop in plastic bag use in Ireland.

So there is a good idea, but an even better idea is to just get a long-lasting hemp bag and not pay this tax at all, let them try to collect it from lunatics and US diplomats arrogant enough to carry on using the plastic bag. Hopefully, though, all this will NOT lead to people using environmentally destructive cotton bags, as Anya Hindmarch tried to do earlier this year. She and other eco-wannabes need to be restrained, otherwise we might just end up destroying the world's waterways and arable land by more cotton cultivation. [see related posts for more details].