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.

As the global recession takes hold...bugger the environment

In the current issue of Private Eye there is a cartoon in which the EU environment ministers re-assess climate targets. "Great! We can dump these targets that we were never going to meet and blame the banks".

On the same page there is an article about Gordon Brown campaigning to get the price per litre of fuel reduced, yet high fuel prices really were causing people to re-think their driving habits even before the banking system went tits up and people started feeling financially vulnerable.

As we know living in an ethical and environmentally friendly manner can be achieved fairly easily by those who can afford it, but with a recession the number of people who feel that they can afford the luxury of prolonging human existence on the planet beyond their lifetime will surely reduce.

Of course it doesn't need to be expensive to be green, but it takes more effort to do it on the cheap. Let's hope the cause doesn't get forgotten as world governments scramble to find ways to restore the reckless standard of living that their populations have become accustomed.