Green Thoughts

Colin Ward

• Seasons of the Seal by Fred Bruemmer and Brian Davies
  Bloomsbury, 160 pp, £16.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 7475 0214 5
• Whale Nation by Heathcote Williams
  Cape, 191 pp, £15.00, August 1988, ISBN 0 224 02555 4
• Falling for a dolphin by Heathcote Williams
  Cape, 47 pp, £4.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 224 02659 3
• Prisoners of the Seas by K. A. Gourlay
  Zed, 256 pp, £25.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 86232 684 2
• Progress for a Small Planet by Barbara Ward
  Earthscan, 298 pp, £5.95, September 1988, ISBN 1 85383 028 3
• Future Earth: Exploring the Frontiers of Space edited by Nigel Calder and John Newell
  Christopher Helm, 255 pp, £14.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 7470 0420 X
• Sizewell B: An Anatomy of the Enquiry by Timothy O’Riordan, Ray Kemp and Michael Purdue
  Macmillan, 474 pp, £45.00, September 1988, ISBN 0 333 38944 1
• Early Green Politics by Peter Gould
  Harvester, 225 pp, £29.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 7108 1192 6
• Dreamers of the Absolute by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
  Radius, 312 pp, £7.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 09 173240 9
• The Coming of the Greens by Jonathon Porritt and David Winner
  Fontana, 287 pp, £4.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 00 637244 9
• Ecology and Socialism by Martin Ryle
  Radius, 122 pp, £5.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 09 182247 5

The membership of environmental organisations in Britain is double that of the political parties and three times that of Sunday worshippers in the Church of England. Each of us has some links with the green movement and each of these books reflect one or other of these concerns. Everyone outside the farming industry is outraged by its subsidised destruction of woodlands, hedges, wetlands and wildlife, as well as by the pollution of water sources by nitrogenous fertilisers. Others are worried about the seas, their mounting pollution and the fate of their creatures. Still more are troubled about the air we breathe and the skies: the ozone layer, chlorofluorocarbons, acid rain and the radioactivity released by nuclear fission.