Our disturbing ignorance - Electric Picnic waste shocking

Great reform comes after a great change in perception and behaviour. Great social change means making new ideas proactive and rejecting long-established norms.

The great, and hopefully irreversible, shift around smoking is a modest example of this advance, one achieved despite persistent and dishonest opposition. Efforts to confront our greatest challenge — climate change — face persistent and dishonest opposition too.

That opposition endures because we have yet to match our cheap, hollow rhetoric with action. The dangerously unsustainable Food Harvest 2025 and our failure to cut emissions are examples of this denial as national policy.

This weekend we saw another disheartening example of how we seem unable to mend our ways. It is estimated that an average of 10kg of waste per person was left on the site by the 50,000-strong crowd at the Electric Picnic Festival.

It is impossible to hold an event on this scale without generating some waste but this quantity suggests a dangerous ignorance.

That the festival’s demographic — largely middle class and educated — should know better makes this indifference disturbing.

Ironically, many festival supporters will protest when President Trump visits but when his presidency fades and is just a bad, embarrassing memory their environmental legacy will be of real consequence.

We must learn how to live and how to enjoy ourselves without being so very destructive — and we don’t have much time to do so.