King Charles was a green visionary - will he dare be as radical now?

Charles has long been known for his interest in ecology. His views were once naive, but they have - hopefully - maturedThe point has been repeated many times since September that, as king, Charles has been stripped of much of the freedom that for 50 years he enjoyed as an environmental activist. But the new job presents opportunities to set his own house in order that may prove the more impactful. If there's promise in these first months of Charles's accession to the British throne, it lies in the recent decision to permit a PhD researcher - extraordinarily, for the first time - into the royal archives to interrogate historic connections with transatlantic slavery (and so to the roots of contemporary climate breakdown) rather than his personal track record, however commendable, in organic agriculture and biofuel production.Like so many within the mainstream environmental movement, Charles's passion for ecology has seen him, throughout his career, walking the long road away from a eugenicist vision of nature - the idealised vision of a world without people. This idea shaped the commitments of his father. Prince Philip served as a key steward of the World Wildlife Fund from its inception in 1961 while also sharing fantasies in public about being reincarnated as a "deadly virus, to contribute something to the problem of overpopulation". Continue reading...