From the Editor

Something made me read it. I know most junk mail’s a shocking waste of time as well as paper, but when you’re pressed for time there’s something perversely luxurious about squandering a bit of it. Like the kid in the classic Ben Elton sketch, stuck at home with a backlog of homework - stuff to do - and suddenly finding it essential to rifle through the TV Times to consult his horoscope… then everyone else’s horoscope…

Unlike horoscopes, however, mail-order catalogues may have something to tell you. This one did. “Climate change,” it said: “enjoy the outdoors with an array of useful and attractive objects.” And what were its solutions-focused lifestyle-positive offerings? Why, a wide range of patio heaters, and some gas-fired flaming terrace torches too.

My learning from this (as they say in the self-improvement seminars) was: don’t assume everyone has got the point just because they’re using the language. It may seem as if everyone’s talking climate change, carbon cutting, supply-chain ethics, organics - but does that really mean we’re winning? You’d be amazed how readily people can get hold of the wrong end of the stick - as a friend of mine found out long ago in the days of the anti-apartheid boycott. Having assiduously cultivated his greengrocer’s assistance in buying his fruit from impeccably non-South African sources, he eventually discovered that the shopkeeper was sympathetic because he’d taken him for a racist, refusing to eat grapes picked by black fingers.

The ability to look at things inside out, as it were, can be handy for spotting when you’re talking at cross purposes. It can also be a powerful way to get a neat point across. Amory Lovins of the US-based Rocky Mountain Institute does this adroitly with his self-coined term ‘negawatts’, the measure of the energy you don’t have to buy (or generate) when you work out a way of getting the desired outcome with lower inputs.

Then there’s the shock of the cheap. We all love a bargain - but, from the supermarket [see ‘Supermarket sweet? ’] to the world of fashion (the subject of our cover feature, starting with ‘Cutting edge ’), there’s a growing public awareness that crazy prices might involve complicity in something dodgy. Exploitation, in a word, of people and resources, so unsustainable that it’s bound to come back to haunt us. It’s a challenge the big players need to take on board.

Set against that, how’s this for an inside-out concept: the loyalty scheme that gives you money-on, not money-off. Weird? Not necessarily. Delve into the world of offsets (see our special feature, ‘Slipping into neutral ’) and you’ll find it cropping up in a new initiative to get motorists on the road to carbon responsibility. It may not stop there.

These diverse threads of the globalisation drama are not often woven consciously together. But if there is one widely shared perception, it’s that China is where push comes to shove. It’s there that our special supplement goes. Greening the Dragon - it concerns us all.

9 October 2006

Roger East