I must be in a really pissy mood lately, because all it took were two simple newspaper articles this past weekend to get me into another tizzy.  But I ask you - have we completely taken leave of our senses? Take a look at the following:

 

Fair enough.  Even the Financial Times reports on What We Must Do about the Environment. (Wring hands, furrow brow.)
But then we find this.

It’s from an article in a magazine tucked into the same paper which talks about properties for sale on a game reserve whose ecosystem is thriving after years of neglect and exhaustion.

Best of all, ownership entitles the occupant - after an awareness course - to play game warden and take guests on game drives in their 4×4s. 

The magazine is called How to Spend It.  Not time, but money.  Lots of money.  So much money, you not only have the cash to blow on a game lodge in South Africa, but are actually willing to be in the air nearly 24 hours total for the chance to be down there less than 48.  Probably a lot less when you factor in check-in time and just getting to and from the airport.

Environmentally impeccable? Am I the only one who finds the lifestyle of these so-called nature-loving Brits to be an environmental obscenity?

How can we report on one page about there being very little time left to do something about the billions of tons of carbon dioxide spewing into the atmosphere every month when we read on another about people willing to take a jaunt just for the weekend almost half-way round the world?

I took my own carbon footprint test.    Even though I don’t own a car, ride my bike to work, recycle my own toilet paper don’t smoke, and fly around 25 hours per year max, I still stomp around the planet as if I were King Kong on a rampage with a lifestyle that would require 2.5 earths just to sustain it.   Just imagine what these people are doing.

There are some out there for whom money is no object, who are sitting on such a huge pile they can’t spend what they earn in interest and dividends fast enough, who need a whole glossy magazine first weekend of every month just to figure out How to Spend It, but I ask you: how long can this go on?

If they truly want to call themselves nature lovers and own property in South Africa, they should move there and go about it full-time. Failing that, perhaps there should be a hefty surtax on long-haul return flights completed in fewer than three days, so maybe - just maybe - they’ll think twice about it.

Then again, I doubt if that would stop them.  A return flight for two London  -  Johannesburg will already set you back 2,800 euros give or take, but who are we kidding?  People with coin like this wouldn’t be caught dead in cattle class, so let’s see;  First Class is a mere snip of the wardrobe budget at 18,000 euros the pair, but if that’s just too many new boots to go without, you can always slum it in Business for €8,500.

I just hope they enjoy their game drives while they can, because all the efforts at conservation in the world won’t add up to squat if there’s no planet left for the wildlife to live in.

© 2007 lettershometoyou