Eco-loons on the march

Only this morning I got an email from an evidently very bright 17-year-old at a certain nameless public school. ‘I’m so sick of having to study “environmental ethics” for hours on end, being split into “study groups”, and making lovely colourful mind-maps for presentations; the syllabus is infantile, and I feel increasingly infantilised by my relativist, happy-clappy and downright incompetent teachers,’ he wrote. Amen, brother.

I’m not sure who I feel sorrier for: the poor kids being force-fed this drivel; or the poor parents who probably imagined that for the price of £30,000 a year they’d bought the right not to have their beloved ones indoctrinated with all this specious eco-propaganda. But there’s no escape, unfortunately, from the ‘Clamour of the Times’. More unfortunately still, this clamour is going to have truly dangerous consequences for us all.

One of these consequences — the growth of eco-terrorism — was explored in this week’s Storyville: If a Tree Falls — a Story of the Earth Liberation Front (BBC4, Monday). It concerned the various members of ELF (a bit like ALF, only for tree-huggers rather than animal-rights Nazis) imprisoned for a wave of arson attacks on the logging industry in the Pacific North West.

Despite having burned down dozens of buildings and having caused millions of dollars-worth of damage and disruption, the ELF activists still couldn’t see that they’d done wrong. ‘No one got hurt, no one got injured,’ said one of their ringleaders, Daniel McGowan, piously. As for the suggestion that he was guilty of terrorism, this was clearly beyond absurd. ‘Most people who know me, when they hear I’m being charged for terrorism offences, are like “Whaaat?!”’ said McGowan. Then again, since most of McGowan’s ‘people’ seemed to be fellow eco-terrorists, that’s probably not so much of a surprise as he thinks.