Last week I went to a fascinating session by Green Alliance on what might happen to environmentalism in more difficult economic times. Three eminent speakers went through how the conventional wisdom is wrong: people do not jettison environmental attitudes during an economic downturn.

Ian Christie elsewhere on this website writes that a recession can be a a stimulus of the green agenda.

New to me was Bob Worster of IPSOS Mori. He castigated the FT article 'Wilting agenda: Britain loses its appetite for green initiatives' that used his figures as evidence. Nonesense! If you ask people to name the thing at the top of their mind it changes with immediate events and mdeia coverage - which is why worries on the economy are legitimately the on rise in opinion polls. But the underlying attitudes and values that have been growing in the last few years remain.

Andrew Currey of Henley Management Centre showed the rise and rise of indicators of people choosing lower consumption (and cheaper) lifestyles - people joining Freecycle and car-pooling schemes, eBay making second-hand stuff acceptable and available.

You will be able to find a lot more on the Green Alliance website in time. (Better still join up for their magazine articles.) But here are the themes at the end which came out:

1. Get the positive interpretation out there. Some people are gleefully anti-environment, and will try to use this moment. But a recession is a crisis for 'business-as-usual', not its critics.

2. We can grow the value of the economy and the quality of the environment. Its not either/or. Forum will be publishing a a piece with the accounting institute ICAEW later this year on Competitiveness and Sustainability that makes the point.

3. Build on the appetite for collective action. The focus on the individual consumer can go too far. We need to move from "I will if you will" to "we - business and government - have and will, so you - consumer and citizen - can too". Forum are just starting a project on business models for sustainable consumption that will build on this point.

4. Just because we're richer than during the 70s or 90s recession doesn't make it OK to have a downturn. Recessions are bad for social justice. Let's make environmental action good for social justice.