I was an environmentalist once too, back in the days when it was still more about defending wild places and the natural world against untrammelled human ambition, and less about carbon and something obscure called ‘sustainability’. It seemed to me, as I got older, that environmentalism was becoming preoccupied with taming these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – in order to harness green energy to fuel our way of life, and that of a small percentage of the world’s people in particular.
