A Proper Charlie and Slow Boats To China

The Independent Newspaper is very keen on green stories these days, which sometimes sit uneasily besides the lifestyle and consumerist articles and adverts that it also carries. Nevertheless, they are running a good number of interesting articles and series on environmental topics including their current campaign on waste. They report today on the airline trip taken by Prince Charles, wife and retinue to the USA to collect an environmental award.

Now keen observers of this blog will have noticed that I am not a Royalist, but I cannot say that Charles Windsor is not occasionally on the right side. However, his environmentalism is of such a reactionary character and linked to some of the more odious establishment figures of right-wing ruralism that I feel, regardless of my republicanism, that he actually damages the environmental cause. Charles' politics and philosophy as far as we can gather, is not the "spiritualist wet liberalism" that the shallow media seem to have pinned on him (talking to plants and the like), but actually a much more dangerous blend of semi-feudalist ruralism, reactionary new agery and Traditionalism (in the esoteric sense of the word rather than the purely old fashioned - his claim to be defender of "Faith" or "Faiths" rather than The Faith should I believe be seen in this light rather than the liberal interpretation usually put on it) This links him to some very dubious types with soft spots for "thinkers" of the late nineteenth and first half of the 20th Century who were instrumental in developing the intellectual justification for the fascist and totalitarian movements of that dark era. Whether Charles is fully aware of the resonances of some of his statements and the company he keeps in making them is an interesting question.

So now, to top his courting of the worst wings of the environmental movement, he mocks the efforts of campaigners to cut down numbers of flights by flying with his retinue to accept an award from an organisation sponsored by those great champions of the environment, the oil company BP. A proper Charlie indeed.

Elsewhere this week the Independent has had some interesting articles about Carbon Offsetting in the wake of British Government announcements on the topic, and also stuff on the export of toxic waste products to China here and here.