BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The eco-hypocrite walks among us.
You see them in the wild, preaching from their pulpits of purity, their voices ringing with the righteousness of the saved. They speak of carbon footprints, of saving the whales, of the sins of plastic straws and scare little children and lost, middle-aged women with their talk of ‘climate emergency’. And yet, they wear jackets born of oil, sip big-chain coffee from cups capped with plastic hypocrisy, and jet off to eco-retreats in Costa Rica and South Africa, leaving a trail of exhaust fumes in their wake.
They are the high priests of the green gospel, yet their vestments are woven with contradictions.
One stood before me in the airport queue last Thursday, a message sewn into her rucksack declaring, “Stop Fossil Capitalism”, just one hour and a half before we boarded a 1,400-mile flight with a climate cost of 140-150 kg of CO₂ per passenger.
The eco-hypocrite walks among us.
Take the man in his Tesla, for instance. He glides silently through the city, smug as a cat in cream, his electric chariot a symbol of his virtue. But ask him where the lithium in his battery comes from, and he will stammer. The mines of Bolivia, perhaps? The child labour in the Congo? No matter. Out of sight, out of mind. The Tesla is clean, and so is his ‘conscience’.
Or consider the woman at the farmers’ market, her wicker basket brimming with organic kale and artisanal sourdough. She speaks of food miles, of the evils of industrial farming, of the sanctity of the soil. But her almond milk? Grown in California, where the aquifers run dry and the bees drop dead from exhaustion. Her quinoa? Shipped from Peru, where farmers can no longer afford their own staple crop. Still, she smiles, her tote bag proclaiming, Save the Planet, as she clambers up into her Chelsea Tractor.
The eco-hypocrite walks among us.
Then there are the celebrities, the high priests of the movement. They stand on stages at Glastonbury, microphones in hand, urging the masses to go vegan, to ditch fast fashion, to live simply. Look at how they protest in their oil-polymer-based North Face! And yet, their private jets idle on the tarmac, their mansions glow with the energy of a small power plant, while their wardrobes and online stores burst with garments stitched by underpaid hands in distant lands where life expectancy remains stubbornly low.
Even the politicians are not immune. They pass laws banning plastic bags, then fly to climate conferences in private planes. They pollute our glorious green fields with solar panels made in China, but their offices are warmed by fossil fuels. They preach sacrifice, yet their lives are padded by their shameless exploitation of the public purse, often brushing off their extravagance with the laughable excuse of it being ‘public service’.
The eco-hypocrite is not always a villain, and rarely exactly. Some mean well, perhaps. But their lives are a patchwork of compromises, a quilt of contradictions. They are the preacher who sins on a Saturday and repents on a Sunday, the dieter who sneaks cake at midnight.
The eco-hypocrite walks among us.
Can they not see how utterly childish they appear?
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books.