Cooking up rightwing connections

Fred Pearce's article on The Ecologist's record over the last 30 years (Age of rage, July 12) was very charitable. However, it is much less charitable about me in those passages inspired by my ex-colleague Nicholas Hildyard and his guru Larry Lohmann.

My "flirtation" with the far right is a fiction. I have never had the slightest contact with any far right political party in any country. I have given two talks to new right cultural associations in France (1994) and in Belgium (1997). Everybody must be made aware of the escalating environmental destruction caused by our present economic policies if we hope to reverse them.

I do indeed believe in traditional society. For me, only a society based on the family and the community, in which people are emotionally linked to their society and the natural world by their traditions and their religion, can possibly be sustainable. However, for Hildyard and Lohmann, a religion that plays such a role is "authoritarian" and hence taboo.

However, they have their own authoritarian taboos, in particular against the expression of values that do not coincide with theirs.

Edward Goldsmith,

The Ecologist