Green to the core

Have you not been seperating you plastics? Been leaving your television on standby? Taking the odd bath? Well, you might as well have just kicked a panda to death in a foot-crazed killing spree, you monster.

Or at least that’s the impression that I’ve been getting recently. Being a highly impressionable lad, the BBC’s Climate Chaos season and persistent badgering by every newspaper about either jetting off to foreign climes, or how far my runner beans have been flown in to make my dinner is giving the impression that the world is on the verge of collapse because I forgot to recycle my Coke can at lunchtime.

Well, I’m not going to argue with the ‘world is on the verge of collapse’ bit. But the coverage of green issues has recently got to such hysterical levels now that it’s totally unsustainable. By this time next year the BBC can look back on its climate change season in self-congratulation before completely forgetting it and moving on to something else; eco-tourism will (mercifully) be forgotten as an exercise in page-filling. The words ‘food miles’ will elicit a blank look from even the most hardened environmentalist.

Indeed, one of the worst offenders has to be eco-tourism. Rather than working out how regular tourism could be changed to be better for the environment, eco-tourism has been hived off into its own bizarre little self-contained world.

It’s obvious that few would go on (or even be able to afford) suggested green travel. But it’s become impossible for the Guardian in recent weeks to have a travel section that is anything but an eco-tourism special. It’s all or nothing; either you spend a fortnight flagellating with willow sticks in Djibouti (having swam there to prevent using, horror of all horrors, a plane) or you have to stay at home in your grimy lives for the summer.

All reporting on any environmental front has taken on Newsround-esque qualities (this columnist’s premier source of current affairs). News editors are faced with having to incorporate an environmental dimension to stories that wouldn’t normally have to accomodate it, so it just gets ostracised into its own screeching, self-important world.

It’s easier to shoehorn all your conscience’s need to provide coverage of climate change et al in one fell swoop than bringing it into reporting on a wider basis (re: Newsnight’s Ethical Man).

It has become impossible to report on environmental issues in any real context. The real questions about how to deal with environmental catastrophes such as the Three Gorges dam are easily ignored because coverage of it is hived off from the wider picture. If the economic benefits and reasoning behind why the Chinese government were brought into the equation then the monstrous end result would not be so easily brushed aside as eco-ravings, but more easily understood as an exercise in autocratic wielding of power.

Students’ Unions are, in many ways, the apex of flagellation with no resulting benefits (although there are mercifully many that are much worse than us). We’ve debated about condemning far away companies for their environmental and social policies. Yet do we have decent recycling facilities? Do we heck. After venting so much green steam, few have the time left to put anything in place.

In the end, environmental issues are always going to play second fiddle to bigger stories, be it the importance of the economy, or maintaining a secure energy supply. But at least that puts it in a context that is absent from the current round of green noise.

In the mean time, we might as well just settle down to some enviro-baiting and wait for sanity to revisit the debate. So what if you’re a-kicking the panda from this great distance? At least you’ll be able to cross Djibouti off your holiday list this year.