The low winter sun that blinded me from behind the City buildings did look strangely like the end of the world that morning. Or the beginning of a new one? I couldn’t decide at the time.

In any case, there was something very different about that breakfast event, where a Deutsche Bank economist addressed the mostly business audience with the words “I’m here today because of my personal irritation with GDP growth.”

There in the midst of the credit crunch, Pavan Sukhdev wanted to talk to us instead about the value of the goods and services that fall between the cracks of conventional spreadsheets: the clean air, water and biodiversity that are ‘worth’ so much less than gold and diamonds in monetary terms – until you don’t have them.

He came up with the sobering calculation that while Wall Street had already lost $1-$1.5 trillion by then, we are losing natural capital worth between $2-$5 trillion every year.

But it wasn’t so much the figures in his report, ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’, that struck me. Sukhdev said himself that his job wasn’t to come up with a new value for the Earth – that’s impossible. Actually, it was the way in which everything that the environmental movement has been banging on about for years – disappearing forests, dying coral reefs – was talked about with a serious business head on. As he said, the only reason to put a value on these resources is that they’d get overlooked if they weren’t given a price tag.

I’ve never been a great believer in number crunching, but he won me over to the force of economics that morning. And to believing that it’s essential to package up the solutions to our disappearing resources – you know, straightforward things like forestry projects in Costa Rica or ecotourism schemes in Uganda – into neat financial tools. ‘Wetland banking’, ‘forest securitisation’, ‘endangered species credits’, they’re all going to float an investor's boat. In the end, it’s about speaking the right language.

As I stepped out in the crisp air, with the sun now high in the sky, I think I’d answered my own question.

I don’t know how I thought a ‘sustainable fashion show’ would look... Certainly not this: An army of doleful stick-like models marching up the catwalk to a backdrop of gritty retropop, all punctuated with paparazzi-style flashes.

‘Sweat shop industry’ rang like an alarm bell in my head. If they’ve got in girls this skinny, I thought, how can it be about sustainable fashion? Aren’t we meant to be promoting healthy bodies, too?

But as the models did their serious, sultry walk, in turquoise hotpants, breathtaking black dresses, and clothes verging on works of art, I was so glad the London College of Fashion had gone for an authentic, hard-nosed event. They gave us exactly what everyone – except us greenies perhaps – expected to see on a catwalk.

Because as much as I love the earthy look of People Tree or Howies catalogues – think ruddy complexions and wholesome prints – I couldn’t think of anything worse than a fashion show along the same lines. Especially not at the heart of the capital’s high street culture.

The best thing about the students’ designs themselves were that they didn’t smack of sustainability. There was chunky jewellery, tassels, layers, those hideous 80s batwing cardigans – basically everything that’s in the magazines at the moment. Only a few pieces looked really ‘recycled’, but most were tongue in cheek anyway; one jacket had a whole load of wallets stitched on the outside as a 'statement'.

It wasn’t until I read the catalogue afterwards that I realised the chainmail-style top that had caught my eye actually was made of Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood (can you believe it?!) and that the collection featuring gorgeous pastel-coloured ruching used 90% reclaimed fabric. Just looking at Manon Flener’s collection, I wouldn’t have known that the edgy-looking brass studs were what made the pieces ‘modular’ (i.e. you can put them together in almost any combination, and not get bored of your clothes), or that Lindsay Weir’s stuff was completely carcinogen-free – so not a trace of phthalates, phenols or heavy metals...

And that’s the point. If these students are one day going to take their ideas to the high street and catch the eye of absent-minded shoppers, they can’t rely on their eco-credentials (some of which would need a pretty big label to spell out) to sell them. It sounds like they’ve got just the right attitude: You want fashion? We can do it. Leave the ethical dilemmas up to us.

Dominic Lawson, who’s joined his father Nigel’s crusade against climate science, has penned a blistering review in The Independent of Ethan Greenheart’s Can I recycle my granny?.

On the surface, that’s hardly surprising. Ethan’s account of his eco-martyr’s lifestyle is an easy target. He won’t travel anywhere that can’t be reached on foot. He extols the virtues of growing your own baby food (lentils and spinach, fertilised by the baby poo they help to generate). He castigates confetti because it contains artificial colouring which leaches into the earth – “the wedding day equivalent of acid rain”. And, he tells us, “'I do love my kids, but not a day passes when I don’t tell them what a burden they are to the planet.” So it’s just as well, perhaps, that they do their bit to lighten the load by working the treadle pump generator which powers his computer…

It’s ripe for parody. And of course (as you’ve doubtless spotted by now), that’s exactly what it is. Greenheart’s a caricature dreamed up by that provocatively libertarian webzine Spiked Online. Like all good parodies, it satirises the wilder fringes of its target in order to cast doubt on the more sober, mainstream core.

It’s just possible that the reviews editor at The Independent didn’t spot the spoof; treated the book as a genuine example of green loonery run rampant, and so cast around for a confirmed eco-baiter to rip it to shreds.

But it’s hard to believe that a bright spark like Lawson (whose father, incidentally, is featured in Spiked) wouldn’t have known that Ethan was a comic creation – or at least spotted it once he’d skimmed a few pages.

So why bother to slate a spoof – unless it’s simply a mischievous effort to help persuade the gullible that environmentalists are all Ethans at heart, dumping the burden of the world’s woes on their hapless children along with the poo on the spinach…

I’m writing this on Eurostar as it races over the flat and featureless plains of northern France (scenery made for speed, if ever there was), en route to Brussels. It’s costing me around £70 more to go overland than it would by air. So am I a typically smug eco-angel, selflessly forking out the extra dosh to keep my green halo intact?

Am I hell.

I’m travelling like this for two reasons: i) it’s simpler, calmer and a lot more comfortable; and ii) I get more work done.

At first glance, that last statement looks odd. Surely the plane would get there faster, so I’d have more time to work?

Not as such. Factor in the hours it takes to get to the airport, add in the endless crawl through security, the wait for the luggage at the other end, followed by the long journey into town. Then consider the fact that the flight is so short there’s hardly time to open the laptop before you’re briskly reminded that “all electronic devices must be switched off during take off and landing”. (Which is probably just as well, considering the near certainty that at some point your neighbour’s elbow will propel his cheap red wine and complimentary nuts all over your meticulously-compiled but unsaved spreadsheet…).

Add it all up, and you have several hours of tedium laced with occasional stress.

By comparison, trains are a mobile oasis of peace and productivity, especially if you opt for the quiet carriage, leave your dongle in your bag – and resist the urge to text hourly proof of your continued existence to colleagues and friends.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

‘They’ being the likes of Tesco, BAA and E.ON, all members of the 18-strong Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG). Their call for government action to achieve “deep and rapid” carbon cuts was promptly denounced by Greenpeace as “hypocrisy of a previously unknown magnitude”.

How dare companies intent on expanding airports and coal power have the gall to say such things, thundered the activists. In the words of a Greenpeace spokesman: “it makes an environmentalist’s jaw drop.”

Dispensing moral outrage on cue is part of Greenpeace’s job description, of course, but in this case it might just be a knee jerk too far. Because all the CLG is doing, in effect, is echoing campaigners’ demands for tough government action.

Even some of the vocabulary is the same, with dire warnings against putting your faith in “incremental change”.

So what are these companies supposed to do? Pretend their activities have no impact? Put out a tide of greenwash? Defy their fiduciary duty by cutting out every shred of unsustainable business and then piously go bust? Get real…

In some ways they look less like hypocrites, more like a queue of turkeys at a polling station, eagerly waiting to cast their ballot in favour of an early Christmas. At the very least, they’re showing a touching faith in their ability to reinvent their businesses as completely climate-friendly – should the government actually wake up and respond to their call. (A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that the chances of it doing this are so slight that the chief exec of BAA could march up and down Whitehall with a banner saying “Flying: It’s Plane Stupid!”, for all the harm it would do him…)

But the truly striking aspect of the CLG statement is that, to all intents and purpose, they’re finally admitting what the likes of Greenpeace have said for years: that voluntary action will never be enough, and that business needs the firm hand of government to force it to do the right thing.

In effect, these companies are asking the politicians to save them from themselves.

It’s not the first time any business has issued such a call, but it’s still pretty jaw-dropping stuff. Just not for the reasons that Greenpeace says it is…

There aren’t many subjects on which I prefer Harry S Truman’s words to those of Oscar Wilde. But the former US president’s prosaic definitions – “a pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, while an optimist makes opportunities of his difficulties” seem more helpful in these crunch times than the poet’s cry, “the basis of optimism is pure terror”.

Much of this issue of Green Futures focuses on that gloomiest of topics, economic recession. But you’ll note a recurring strain of optimism (Truman style) in the analysis of what a worsening crisis might open up for the sustainability agenda. Martin Wright has canvassed the views and expectations of a wide range of ‘thinkers and doers’ for our cover feature ‘Into the red, out with the green’. None of them could be accused of ‘blind optimism’ – their attitudes are based on evidence, backed by well reasoned argument. All of them consider the balance of threats and opportunities, while looking for a path forward rather than a place to hide.

This positive spirit does not lead everyone to the same conclusions. Indeed, optimism is one of the few common ingredients in such radically divergent perspectives as Lester Brown’s conviction that a great leap forward for cleantech means coal is dead in America, and Yorkshire Forward’s aim of boosting regional revival by investing big-time in carbon capture and storage. You couldn’t accuse Green Futures of closing its mind to debate.

Nor is this magazine all about recession. Far from it. In fact, it’s full of people and the many and varied things that matter to them – from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the founder of Passion for the Planet and that enigmatically named train travel guru, the Man in Seat 61. There are serious pieces on tough policy issues too, in our regular Whitehall Watch, and Rebecca Willis’s critique of shadow carbon pricing. Not to mention a full dose of solutions-focused news in the Briefings section – and much else besides.

If all this prompts you to action, or reflection, or just helps boost your level of creative optimism, then Green Futures will be worth the (carefully chosen) paper it’s printed on. Don’t forget that there will be more news, views and features on our regularly updated website to keep you going over the summer until you next see us back in print again. And remember, too, that we value your feedback and your contributions to the debate – by letter, email, or (easiest of all?) by adding your comments to what you read online.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Roger East
roger@greenfutures.org.uk

Are we in danger of a ‘perfect storm’ – where tough economic times combine with a surge in populist denial of global warming, and so throw the hard-won consensus on the need to tackle climate change into doubt?

That was the first thought that struck me on seeing how gleefully some of the press picked up, exaggerated and wildly misinterpreted a study by scientists on shifts in ocean circulation. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, suggested these could lead to lower temperatures, offsetting the effects of global warming for a few years.

The Telegraph’s headline, “Global warming may stop, scientists predict”, epitomised the laziness of a media desperate for any ammunition which might dent the solidity of the evidence on climate change.

I should point out, in fairness to its environment editor Charles Clover, that the article which followed concluded with a decent, balanced account of a complex issue – but how many of the paper’s readers would bother to get that far once their prejudices had been confirmed? Precious few, to judge by the surge in posts to the paper’s ‘Have Your Say’ slot, citing the new study as yet more evidence of “the biggest con-trick ever played on the human race”, as one particularly splenetic correspondent put it.

Small wonder, perhaps, that polls already show growing scepticism on climate change. In Britain at least, that’s been fuelled by last year’s atrocious summer, and an uncertain start to this one. As the latest study emphasises, climate change is a long-term threat. Its impacts will almost certainly dwarf the worst that any conceviableconceivable recession can throw at us - but while most of those impacts most of them remain on the distant horizon, they can seem small and inconsequential by comparison.

Which makes it all the harder for politicians to justify anything approaching ‘green’ taxes. And therefore all the more vital that anyone wanting to engage the wider public in the fight against climate change should stress the many ‘win-wins’ on offer, through strategies such as improving energy efficiency, generating local energy and enjoying local food. Strategies which make life sweeter and safer in the here and now, in other words.

It might be tempting to keep banging on about the looming apocalypse, but it’s likely to be self-defeating – like crying wolf when all seems quiet.. If the vast majority of climate scientists are right – and there’s no reason to doubt them – then global warming will soon be back on the front pages, whether we like it or not.

Martin Wright 

If you wanted a persuasive advert for 'Slow Travel', you could do worse than compile a clip of outraged interviewees in the queues at Terminal Five.

My personal favourite was the woman en route to Glasgow, who’d been waiting for 24 hours for her flight. In that time, she could have made the journey by train at least five times – and without having to haul herself to and from the cities’ outskirts in the process.
 
Fortuitously, news of the T5 chaos broke on the morning of a debate I was chairing at the RSA. The topic: whether, in this carbon-constrained world, Slow Travel was morally the only way to go.

It’s certainly impressive how quickly the phrase has caught on. If you said ‘Slow Travel’ to someone a year or so ago, they’d have assumed you were describing a particularly gruesome crawl into Paddington.

Now the Sunday supplements, which were full of frenetic features on how to get the most out of 48 hours in Cairo or Cuba, are falling over themselves to extol the joys of the Slow Train to Provence.

Like its Slow Food cousin, Slow Travel comes imbued with a sense of quality, of luxury even. It’s an alluring concept, neatly equating a more sustainable life with a more leisured, pleasurable one.

None of which has escaped the attention of the upmarket tour companies, who’ve fast cottoned on to the fact that they can charge a lot more for a slow week in France than a fast fortnight in Bali.

It’s partly down to demographics, of course. Slow often goes with cultural, restful, retreat-ish holidays – very much the preference of the more ‘mature’ traveller, whose wallet can expand to fit.

Small wonder, perhaps, that everyone’s tripping over themselves in a race to go slow.

And not before time. There are no hydrogen-powered, zero-carbon planes taxi-ing down the crowded runways, nor are there likely to be in the foreseeable future. Sooner or later, we may simply not have the luxury of choice. It’ll be go slow, or don’t go at all.

For a society accustomed to dirt-cheap getaways, that will mean quite a shift in culture.
That’s why Forum for the Future has launched its Overland Heaven project – exploring ways of making low-carbon travel both more effective and more desirable.

But even if it were possible to have carbon-free speed, is it speed itself that’s the essence of the problem?

Maybe in rediscovering the ‘essential slowness’ of travel, we can also have a chance to reacquaint ourselves with the lost virtues of contemplation and reflection. A chance to appreciate the subtle differences in geography, of culture, which can come into focus through the windows of a train, say, rather than passing in a blur between depature lounge and carousel.

Is this really about taking the slow route to the soul?

Or is it actually a bit of a middle-class fad? Another excuse to look down our noses at the hoi-polloi, jetting off on their Ryanair stag breaks to Reykjavík, while we enlightened few feel all smug and insulated on that Slow Train to Provence…

The answer, I suspect, is all of the above. It won’t be the first time that an element of aspiration, if not downright snobbery, has helped drive behaviour change in a more sustainable direction: it happened with organic food, it happened with fair trade, and it could well happen with green energy, too.

If Slow really is, as someone memorably described it, the new Merc, that can only add to its appeal. That, and a few days’ cringe-making chaos at Terminal Five.

Meanwhile, a couple of impromptu audience surveys at the RSA suggested that it’s going to be a long journey to real slowness.

First, I asked all those who’d be prepared to give up all long-haul holiday flights to show their hands. A scattering of palms were raised – maybe 1 in 10, at most. And that, remember, was flying for pleasure alone – not work. Second, how many people would find it easier to give up their car than give up flying. The room was a sea of raised hands…

A podcast of the RSA debate, featuring Martin Wright, Ed Gillespie and John Adams, will shortly be available at www.rsa.org.uk/audio

The scooter lay on its side in the dust when I got there, its front wheel still spinning. The mother was scrambling to her feet, shouting at her son as he careered down the roadside chasing after the chicken. The father struggled to set the machine upright, while his little girl sat on the ground, bawling her eyes out, but apparently unscathed.

You can’t travel for long on India’s crowded roads without stumbling – in my case, almost literally – on a crash of some sort.

This Lucknow family just lost a chicken. Around 90,000 Indians lose their lives on the roads every year – and only 5% of them are in cars.

Hence the appeal of the Tata Nano. At around £1,200, it promises relatively safe motoring for tens of millions of Indian families, not to mention their chickens.

It also brings the prospect of a surge in vehicle pollution, catapulting India into the premier league of carbon emitters.

So are environmentalists howling with outrage? If you scan a few Indian bulletin boards, you’d think that was the case. Since Tata announced the Nano, they’ve been bursting with comments lambasting ‘cosseted Westerners’ for daring to suggest this was anything other than excellent news for India’s poor. How can the rich world presume to deny Indians the right to travel safely? How dare they heap praise on Toyota’s Prius (average mpg 46) while denigrating the Nano (average mpg 54)? And so on, and so on...

In actual fact, few Western environmentalists have dared to put their heads over the parapet on this one. Most of the meaningful criticism has come from Indian activists such as Sunita Narain and Malini Mehra.

But all this does serve to flag up one classic dilemma of sustainable development: namely, what happens when an initiative aimed at meeting people’s aspirations and improving their quality of life runs slap bang into environmental limits? When the social and economic pillars of sustainability, in other words, come crashing down onto the environmental one?

Because there’s no doubting the fact that the Nano’s doing exactly that. Once you start to factor in the climate cost, there’s no such thing as a cheap car. Some of the very same people who’ll benefit from Tata’s new baby will also lose out, potentially devastatingly, as climate change wreaks havoc on India’s agriculture.

The Nano’s apparent affordability looks all the more illusory when you factor in the subsidies which keep petrol so cheap at the pump. According to the Asian Development Bank, Indian fuel subsidies account for a hefty US$17.5 billion a year – and rising, as the government, wary of political fallout, battles to avoid passing on to the electorate the recent surge in crude oil prices. (If you factored in a carbon cost as well, the Nano would begin to look distinctly dear.)

So does safer, smoother travel for middle-income Indian families have to come at the price of the planet?

Not necessarily. First, the Nano might actually speed the arrival of a global carbon market. If it helps pump millions more tonnes of carbon into India’s air (and make no mistake, where Tata leads, others will surely follow), it will make it increasingly hard for the Indian government to maintain that it’s a mere victim of climate change, rather than an increasingly powerful driver of it.

India as a whole – even including its Nano drivers – would for a time at least profit from worldwide carbon trading, as per capita emissions are way below those of the West. So if its government could just grasp this particular nettle, it might find the process less painful than it feared.

Second, with a bit of imagination, the arrival of the Nano could actually spur India to develop a more sustainable transport policy. There’s nothing like sitting gridlocked for hours in the Delhi sprawl to convince even the most sceptical minister that there has to be an alternative.

If a swarm of Nanos slows the pace of the capital’s traffic from sluggish to stationary, then our jam-packed minister may decide it really is time for some brave moves– like congestion charges or subsidy reductions, with the revenue hypothecated for improved bus and metro links, maybe.

And it doesn’t have to stop there. If anywhere is crying out for the sort of ‘car clubs’ springing up in European cities [see our recent article ‘Zip through London’], it’s India. So what about a state-sponsored Tata Car Club – run on specially adapted electrically powered, zero-emission Nanos?

Good PR for India, good PR for Tata, and a small step towards squaring the circle of sustainable development.

Returning from swimming this sunny Sunday morning with breakfast on my mind, I pedal along the path towards the new cycle bridge (for this is Cambridge). Turning down to pass Tesco, I am stopped in my tracks by the sight of a long line of bike racks, bustling with newly arriving lock-wielding users of every age, shape and size (for this is opening time).

An upsurge of communal feeling makes me join them. What’s not to like, one might well feel (if one keeps one’s back to the massive sprawl of asphalt carpark), in this orderly bike-and-family-friendly planned urban scene? And through the doors we go, welcomed by appetising smells from the strategically sited in-store bakery.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Pre-wrapped enticements to obesity gang up to sabotage the last vestige of New Year’s healthy eating aspirations. Neighbouring aisles flaunt the cut-price output of every electronic, textile and cookware manufacturing sweatshop in China. It takes iron resolve and single-minded focus – not easy qualities to muster on a sunny Sunday morning – to make it through to the ten-items-or-less till with its uncorrected grammar (though this is Cambridge). But I manage to leave the store with nothing I neither need nor want, and even a relatively modest score on the food miles front (apart from some half-price Chilean cherries, a favourite fruit which our farmers' market just never seems to stock at this time of year).

My sleeping partner seems curiously unmoved by my tales of heroic self-restraint in the temple of Mammon. She has passed on this morning’s swim, having only returned a few hours ago from her day-late women-only Burns-night revelling (for this is indeed Cambridge). But the cherries go down just fine.