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I am a Green and I have been one for most of my life. I don’t hug trees but I have planted 20,000 of them in a mistaken, but well intended, attempt to make the land where I live go back to Gaia faster. I care deeply about the countryside, and even more about the few remaining places as yet untouched. But I am also a scientist, and my main contribution has been Gaia theory, which sees the earth actively sustaining its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself habitable. As a scientist, and from this theory, I consider the earth to have reached a state profoundly dangerous to all of us and to our civilization. I am deeply concerned that public opinion and, consequently, the government listen less to scientists than they do to the Green lobbies. I know that these lobbies are well intentioned, but they understand people better than they do the earth; consequently, they recommend inappropriate remedies and action. The outcome is almost as bad as if the medieval plague had returned in deadly form and we were earnestly advised to stop it with alternative, not scientific, medicine. Alternative medicine has its place, and when we are healthy it is good to avoid strong drugs for minor ailments, and many find relief in acupuncture or homeopathy. But when we are seriously ill we need something stronger. Now that we have made the earth sick, it will not be cured by alternative green remedies, like wind turbines and bio fuels alone. This is why I recommend instead the appropriate medicine of nuclear energy as part of a sensible portfolio of energy sources.

Few would doubt that Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” crystallized Green thinking, but few of us seem to remember that Rachel Carson’s concern was for birds and she saw them as the voices of the natural world. Her warning was about the imminent destruction of wild life by the uncontrolled use of pesticides and herbicides. We Greens do care about the natural world, but as we have grown into a political movement it was inevitable that we took on the concerns of our supporters who, almost all of them, live in cities and know little about the countryside. Their concerns are not about industrial chemicals killing wild life but about the possibility that chemical residues in foodstuff might poison them; I think that we knew that such fears lacked scientific support, but it was intoxicatingly easy to manipulate them and forget that Rachel Carson’s passionate writing was about the living earth, as was Gaia theory. By ignoring the earth, we Greens have made appalling errors.