Green Extreme! Police warn of Eco-Terrorists.

In today's Observer (one of the "quality" UK Sunday newspapers) is an article entitled Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists which goes on to describe an organisation called Earth First! which allegedy advocates an 80 percent cut in the global human population in order to save the planet.

Apparently the organisation is being monitored by The National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit who are expecting a 'lone maverick' acting on behalf of Earth First! to "attempt a terrorist attack aimed at killing large numbers of Britons."

Fucking psychos you might think. Especially if you stop reading shortly after the fold. Earth First! is clearly up there with Al Qaeda in the classmates most likely to bring about the end of your life shortlist. Probably all eco warriors are the same too, just like all Muslims probably want to kill you, and living in England in the 80's I'm still not so sure the Irish won't blow me up either. But those eco monkeys. Fuck, this is the worst yet.

Actually the article does work really hard to conjour up images of "climate camps" as terrorist training facilities where you can literally learn to put the warrior into eco-warrior.

The thing is if you carry on reading you find that Earth First! don't actually subscribe to mass culling of the species at all. As an anonymous spokesman suggests "the ecology also includes humans". That is a nod towards balance and actually demonstrates an amount of journalism (see I told you the Observer was a quality paper).

So they probably aren't really encouraging mass slaughter of innocents then, although a quick scan over the Earth First! (sorry, EF!) website seems to indicate that they are far from harmless. They might be non-violent, but they will quite happily publish tales of vandalism perpetrated by members of the organisation. Which does make them a bunch of idiots and an easy scapegoat if there is any value in creating the image of a radicalised dangerous form of eco-terrorist.

You see it all helps to discredit environmental causes in the current financial climate where green/ethical business practices will be unnecessarily expensive maintain and governments have spent all the money they had for dealing with climate change on bailing out the banks. It would be much easier if we all just thought these greenies were a bunch of loonies and didn't really want to associate with their ideals any more. Then we might be less inclined to ask our leaders to do difficult and expensive things like SAVING THE FUCKING PLANET!

So well done mass media, well done activist twats, well done credit crunch, you've given the spin-monkeys everything they need.

Steal my idea wouldya? About.com I'm callin' you out!

Whilst mooching around the environmental websites I spotted this article on the About.com Environmental Blog.

What does this have to do with us? Nothing other than it's nice when an apparently Pullitzer prize nominated journalist is ripping off your articles (and your follow up article). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery Larry, but you could at least have the good grace to link back to the old Earth Dream me old mucker jimminy lad barnacle son from the briney!

Of course it could be a coincidence, Larry could have just thought of the exact same idea for an article a month or so after we did and used most of the same categories as us. I mean I doubt the About.com entry in our links page even registers in their referrer logs so I doubt they made it back here via that route. I'm sure Larry, the Pullitzer prize nominee simply had a great idea independently of us and wrote his article. The fact that we did it first just means that we are better than Larry.

So where is my Pullitzer then?

The Great Green Rip-Off

As I write this update there is a debate on politically suspect morning talk show "The Wright Stuff", the gist of which seems to be that it's all well and good for political parties to be seen to be promoting Green issues but when it comes to winning an election if those Green issues will cost the public money then you'd best forget them or forget your chances of government.

The message being put across by this oh-so-enlightened host is that the argument can be reduced to people will vote for the party that says it will cut taxes rather than the one that says it will save a remote polar goose.

Thanks for your helpful contribution to the debate Jeremy Kyle.