Environmental protection: Ignoring the warnings is very stupid

LIKE a bright but distracted child, maybe a slightly frightened one, who can’t concentrate long enough at exam time to realise their potential, we seem unable to focus properly on, or even process honestly, myriad warnings about how our relentlessly cavalier attitude towards the environment will eventually change our world utterly — and not by any means for the better.

It is possible that we may be daunted, if not overawed, by the huge scale of the challenge involved if we are not to bequeath a limping, hideously scarred and far less productive world to our children, grandchildren and to those as yet unborn. Yet, we cannot afford the luxury of looking away, of keeping our heads buried in the warming sand and deluding ourselves that initiatives we blithely regard as progress — like increasing the national dairy herd by 30% or Sitka spruce monocultures from horizon to horizon say — are anything other than incremental steps towards a world tottering on the very cusp of unsustainability.

In recent days the story of unconscionable human depredation was told in several ways.