. . . Helder, though not an activist was singing from the same song-sheet: 'I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them'.
Sadly, the green movement appears to have a record of instability, exhibited in the suicide/murder of German Green party founder Petra Kelly and her lover Gert Bastien, or the crank British sports commentator David Icke - a spokesman for the greens until he shifted his allegiance to little green men - or the hermit-like 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski, who bombed corporate America.
Environmentalism cannot explain individual psychological flaws, but the movement itself has proven to be ideologically unstable. Green activist George Monbiot - horrified to discover that his own book 'Captive State' was given a glowing book review by British National Party chairman Nick Griffin (see 'Blair's corporate Britain' www.bnp.org.uk/article49.html), urged greens to distance themselves from the far right, even naming reactionaries like Aidan Rankin, the former Ecology leader writer now writing for the neo-Fascist Third Way group (Stealing Our Clothes, Guardian 30 April).
But then Monbiot writes more column inches trying to dissuade environmentalists from reactionary ideas than he does arguing the cause. This week Monbiot was denouncing greens for lending support to the Not In My Back Yard opponents of new development to relieve the British housing shortage. Last May Monbiot was denouncing anti-capitalist agitators Reclaim the Streets as an 'association of incoherent vigilantes' (Streets of Shame 10 May 2000). And then he turned on his fellow greens - like the ex-Greenpeace chair Lord Melchett, who took a job with image consultants Burson Marsteller, promoters of Genetic Modification - for selling out to big business ('Business of Betrayal', Guardian 15 January 2002). Neo-nazi, corporate, little Englander vigilantes? Maybe Monbiot ought to ask what is wrong with the green ethos that it spins off in such exotic directions.
Part of the answer was given by the French gunman Robert Durn, who protested that nobody was paying attention to him, or US mail-bomber Helder who complained 'all of my family and friends were raised to believe . . . to be gullible'. A common element of the green philosophy is a contempt for humanity proportionate to the lionisation of nature. Coupled with the belief that conscience is a higher principle than democracy, that underpins the direct action movement, this contempt makes it easy for environmental cranks to short cut the process of public debate by turning to terror.