From The Editor

How much longer can we go on like this?

Across the spectrum, publications that straddle the print/web media divide are reassessing their positions. Constantly. As the gulf between the two worlds widens, each bright forward-looking foot-in-either-camp balancing act gets overtaken by a new conception of the state of the art - and looks uncomfortably like a backward-looking compromise.

When Green Futures started out ten years ago, we did consider making it electronic first, paper second (if at all). The future, surely, was on the screen, not the page. More up-to-the-minute, more sustainable, too.

But we didn’t opt for electronic-only then, and, to be honest, we’d have struggled if we had. Green Futures needed the familiarity, accessibility, portability and elegance of print on paper. It needed to be seen to arrive, physically, on readers’ desks and doormats, with what we like to think is welcome regularity. We needed, in short, to push it out there to people who did not know that they were looking for it - the many thousands of people who became our readers, whose engagement in the sustainability debate is so critical, and without whose attention we’d be wasting our time.

Now we are ten. And our experience of publishing both physically and virtually underlines that affection for dead tree culture is hard to shift. Straw polls of our readers suggest that even now most people prefer reading Green Futures on their laps, not their laptops. So we’re still committed to print - and to looking gorgeous with it, we hope.

But, as Martin Wright says in ‘And Another Thing… ’, there’s a cultural/generational shift under way out there in the way people get - and use - entertainment, ideas and information in the interactive world of the electronic media. So, as we go to press, we’re also putting the finishing touches to a revamped website.

We hope you’ll try it, like it, use it, and give us the feedback we need to keep on improving it. You won’t actually need a whole new mindset to benefit from it. You might just appreciate that we’ve made our articles more attractive to read online. There will be better search facilities, including a facility to look at archive material arranged by subject matter. We’ll be able to do more frequent updates. And there’ll be more opportunities to comment - and masses of scope for further innovation.

If dialogue and getting involved is what it’s all about, the letters we’ve had recently show there’s plenty of appetite for debate around what we publish. This issue should arouse more. Our big interview with David Cameron uncovers the complexity behind the familiar media-friendly smile [‘There’s going to be pain’]. Our nanotech feature [‘Small Talk ’] presents contrasting scenarios for the development of this still little-understood science between now and 2015, highlighting the importance of the decisions we make now about the future.

Exciting as the cutting edge may be, our everyday habits and decisions are no less crucial. Where we get our food, for instance. ‘Feeding Martin’ looks at one village’s homegrown answer. Or the difficulty of getting us to switch on to energy efficiency [‘Clear Winners ’]. How much longer can we go on like this? As a friend of mine reflected ruefully, raising the eco-spec of his house isn’t all about sexy microgen stuff; the big wins are more mundane. Insulation, insulation, insulation.

ROGER EAST

8 November 2006

Roger East