George Monbiot on why the link between green issues and alternative medicine must be broken:
This doesn’t mean that we have to be motivated by the science. My environmentalism arises from both a deep love of the natural world and a strong sense of the injustices done to vulnerable people: it’s an emotional impulse, in other words.
But we must at all times be informed by it. There is no room for wishful thinking. What is the point of dedicating your life to campaigning, only to discover that you have wasted it because the facts don’t support you? There is a subtle difference between sticking to your principles – justice for the living and the unborn, the defence of a healthy biosphere, for example – and sticking to your beliefs. We must doubt everything, question everything, believe nothing until it has been demonstrated, and even then subject it to continued scepticism and enquiry. Above all, we must never allow ourselves to imagine that we are finally and definitively right about anything.
Everybody’s putting the boot into Prince Charles’s brand of wishy-washy alternative nonsense at the moment; I couldn’t be more pleased.