What is the biggest environmental problem: climate change? Loss of biodiversity? Soil erosion? Is it our collective failure to harness sustainable technologies, our inability to muster sufficient political will? Or is it there something more vital still: namely the fact that so few people have an understanding of nature and thus find it hard to comprehend what is happening?
This week a further historic step is taken in the battle to hang on the world's remaining tropical rainforests. It is unlikely to make too many headlines, but on Friday two countries will take forward the kind of arrangement that many have talked about but few have had the boldness to actually do.
Climate Week has come under attack for linking up with the Royal Bank of Scotland.
When I started my career in conservation in the mid-1980s, the Forestry Commission was environmental enemy number one. At that time it was using tax incentives and grants to promote large-scale commercial forestry expansion, including across large areas of peatlands in northern Scotland.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”, said the author Aldous Huxley.
Tick, tock, tick tock. Time marches inexorably forward.
When it comes to protecting our environment, I fear that if 2011 is to have any parallel then it might well be 1993. That year was the worst I have known. The Rio Earth Summit had been and gone. For the media and many politicians the environment had been done. It was literally last year's issue. John Major was struggling with an economic downturn and rebellions on his own not-very-green side of parliament.
The impending extinction of tigers, the melting ice
This budget is simply marking time before the election.