Growing a Walnut to Crack a Sledgehammer

Since nobody is going to lift a finger to preserve the Amazon, the Congo Basin or the New Guinea rainforest, the task of saving the world falls to Britain's plucky little gardeners. As with paying for plastic bags and abstaining from red meat one day a week, leaving the lawnmower in the shed for a month will clearly make all the difference while every year or so areas the size of small countries are being reconstituted as savannah. In equally effective spirit, community groups are petitioning our lords and masters to return them the feudal right of growing their own food on unenclosed land. A couple of denizens of the fourteenth-century vegetable patch that is the House of Donors have cheered them on, and they may well gain further support from those well-fed pushers of British gumption who advocate abolishing the planning laws so that the plebs can knock up their own hovels. However, it seems unlikely that Her Majesty's Government, having struggled so long and so pluckily to defend its corporate chums against the BBC and the National Health Service, will abandon its protective instincts when faced with a possible rival to the junk food industry.