SO read the second best headline of the past year which appeared over a picture of a brown blob found on a Nevada cave wall and which kind of, sort of, looked a little bit like the outline of a creature from Jurassic Park if you squinted it at in the right way.

YOU don’t usually think of the Times of London as a source of subversive material, but in July 1967 it carried a most unusual full-page advertisement that exposed the absurdity of establishment thinking on drugs, then and now.

WE HUMANS are a lot closer to nature, and nature a lot closer to us, than we generally realise. And therein lies our last best hope for patching up our suicidal quarrel with our own planet.