I was getting awfully suspicious of environmentalists. Their solutions to problems had an inordinate amount of impracticality about them, more than they would have tolerated in their own lives, and the environmentalists in any given area seemed easy to identify. They were, quite simply, members of the local aristocracy, often living at the end of long country roads. They had learned the lessons of conspicuous consumption and had allowed a certain genteel rusticity to enter into their lives, patterning themselves after the English landed gentry.

They knew the language of ecology, and could describe a future filled with windmills…