MY ECOPIPHANY

During the night I was visited by Mother Earth. I see I was wrong – I had a dream, I had an ecopiphany.

Stop negotiations, planning and dreaming of another runway at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stanstead or anywhere else. Stop talking about moving birds from the marshes at Cliffe, we don’t have to have anymore runways, we don’t need to have any more flights entering or leaving British airspace – we don’t want the pollution. The train can absorb all long haul internal distribution of people and goods at a far lighter burden to the planet; all we need is a decent infracstructure, some fast trains and an integrated transport policy.

Stop allowing shops to sell fruit, vegetables, meat and flowers from Israel, Kenya, New Zealand and Ethiopia without having levied an import tax based upon the distance it’s travelled. Although everything will cost more, this will promote local, seasonal, British produce as the cheapest option based upon it’s lack of travel; all we need is a decent integrated agricultual policy.

Increase the tax on petrol to make people think twice about needless journies like driving to work and taking the children eleven yards down the road to school in a 9.0 litre Hummer People Carrier. Althought this will cost more, this will promote more cycling and walking which in turn will make people more sociable and neighbourly; all we need is some more benches and a decent government with a set of bollocks like the jolly green giant.

Stop all construction, repair and maintenance of gas and coal fed power stations, turn them off, pull them down and build eco-towns powered by solar and wind energy. Although this will cost slightly more than the gas/coal version, it’s sustainable and carbon neutral living, reducing the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere by Britain.

Tell France, currently building it’s latest Nuclear power stations in areas designated as ‘safe’ for the french population, i.e. Britain, to bugger off.

Put into UK legislation that all secondary and tertiary packaging should have a big fuck off ‘SP’ and ‘TP’ label stamped on it to make the wholesalers, traders, supermarkets etc remove it and pay for it’s recycling long before it even gets to us and in turn our dustbins and the local authority waste collection. This will inevitably increase prices at the supermarket as the recycling bill will be passed on to the consumer however the emphasis on packaging minimalisation (or whatever WRAP call it) and recycling will be on the sellers and not the buyers.

So we may not be able to afford a packet of fags, petrol or olives in 2025, and a kiwi fruit will be no more than a memory (then again we’ll probably be growing them in Reading by then) but the planet will be far more able to deal with the pollution from the rapidly growing industries in China and India who will be supplying the majority of the manufactured goods in the world having beaten all European, American and Australasian competition on cost.