An otherwise healthy body of ideas, the Institute for Social Inventions' volume Re-Inventing Society, was infected by the inclusion on page 133 of 'The other side of the Green story', a silly review by Nicholas Saunders of the Adam Smith Institute's scurrilous The Environmental Alphabet.
Perhaps you took the mischievous document filled with city disinformation he parrots for a healthy debunking of some imaginary creeping environmental orthodoxy. In this you would be gravely mistaken, because the only creeping orthodoxy currently evident is the nihilism and fatalism espoused in The Environmental Alphabet. How can you possibly believe that traditional environmentalism needs debunking in a country where three-quarters of sewage is issued into the seas untreated? Where four out of five new aluminium cans are deposited on the ground? Where power users are given no incentives for low consumption? Where high officials are planning for a doubling of motor traffic although sovereign oil reserves have peaked?
Even things as basic as our public rubbish dumps, horrid cauldrons of domestic, industrial and toxic waste all mixed together, are the most backward in Northern Europe. The waste industry admits most of them will need about 500 years of safety management. There is still only negligible charge for waste anywhere: an estimated 30,000 industrial waste sites mean that much of the industrial revolution was never really profitable at all. Book-keepers simply discarded part of their costs on us. They still do so.
Nick Saunders's 'surprising' points don't merit being demolished one-by-one. It's enough to note that the local plastic bottle recycling initiatives which he mocks are imaginary, and that the bureaucracy he warns against already thrives in all the wrong places, such as big business, the Inland Revenue and crime security. Why are bureaucrats alright when they are heaping up profits, intruding into individual earnings, or locking up the poor, but not alright when they are recycling plastic, taxing resources or hounding polluters?
Far from being fresh and challenging, I'm afraid Nick Saunders's solecisms are merely naive. They are easily recognisable from the pages of The Times, The Economist and The Financial Times, the journals which the Adam Smith Institute exists to serve.
Rowland Morgan, 22 Lebanon Park, Twickenham TW1 3DG.
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