I am not an avid greenie, nor particularly knowledgeable on the subject but I am surprisingly environmentally friendly. I am unsure about global warming in that we have had the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent Little Ice Age. Also I am unclear how the proper Ice Ages fit in or the suggestions that during the time of the dinosaurs the earth was much warmer. The whole thing may be cyclical and much more complex than we imagine. I also just remember the panic about a new ice age in the late 1970s (though the enclosed link seems to rubbish the theory: there is an excellent conspiracy theory loony typed report in favour of it here). However, things like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are a bit worrying. Of course as a fundamentalist I could fall back on Genesis 8:22 “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Some fundamentalists (mainly American) seem to think that destroying the world would be great as that would bring on the rapture. However, disappointed as I am to spoil any illusions some may have of me; I do not regard this as an acceptable reason to have no interest in the environment and am more into the concept of us being stewards of creation eg Genesis 2:15 “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
As such I am quite into green things (this is helped by my pathological meanness). We have all economy bulbs, I used to cycle everywhere when I worked in Belfast, and I will not use the car to go to local shops: stuff like that. Elenwe would like new expensive cars but a combination of greenness, laziness, poverty and meanness keeps such evils away. So although I would not like to admit it I am actually a bit green (in an orange kind of a way). Unfortunately sometimes green things seem mutually exclusive.
The row about wind farms in Scotland is an extremely interesting case in point. I have been to Lewis and it is a very nice place (though it makes Fermanagh look dry and the North Coast windless). A wind farm there would harness lots of most useful environmentally friendly energy. However, it would spoil a beautiful wilderness and bird sanctuary and the locals (excellent Calvinists in the main) appear mixed in their opinions with the majority of the council in favour but also a great many objections,a substantial number of which are from locals. This debate is typical of the dilemmas which are faced in environmental issues at least to those of us who are non experts and we could have our own version if the plan to have a wind farm off the North Coast ever resurfaces. What do other proper environmental types (as opposed to fundamentalist TUVish green types) think?
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