'So you want to report the environment, and you'd like to be ethical too? You have set yourselves an interesting problem. You'd probably be the first generation of environment writers to talk with robust honesty about the subject. So the first ethical issue is actually to try to find a means of talking frankly and honestly.

It's important to remember that - in spite of the basic impression that journalists have of themselves- you are merely parasites, you are the fleas on the elephant's back. You can conduct yourselves with decorum and decency or not, but you can never be a force for much good or a force for much harm either. You won't conduct the wars, or shape business, industry and commerce. You won't make people rich. All you will do is smirk from behind your hand delightedly when other people make mistakes. This is because you're in the 'mistakes' industry, and in a way that's disgusting.

Now, we need to know to know a tiny bit about the environment itself, to understand why so much nonsense is talked about it. Remember that image of the planet earth floating alone in the universe? The U.S. astronauts beamed it back to us. That's the image that spoiled it all. That's when we started talking nonsense about the world. Suddenly the world's happy materialists, and its happy consumers were turned into guilt-ridden 'greens.' They saw the spaceman's view of the planet and they thought they saw something which was a fragile, static set of natural communities. Actually, nature is, of course, robust, and it's in constant tension. It's dynamic and it is absolutely full of opportunism. It's much more like the market economy than some sort of socialist paradise. What's more, nature's very nasty and it's extremely violent. It doesn't have any high ideals.

Look at this picture of lions. They 'bonk' on the half hour for about three weeks a year in a 'laddish' sort of way. It's extremely unromantic. There's nothing very interesting about it except, of course, we all turn up in droves to watch, which they don't mind. They're not exhibitionists. They haven't got enough brains to be that. They just don't care that jeep loads of tourists come along and watch. The only people who mind that there are tourists in paradise are the other tourists. Look at this globe: this picture of a human skull in a Vanitas painting. This is the most important thing on the planet, a chunk of rock in space which was just a rather boring idea-free zone until we came along. Inside this bony dome is the imagination. And the great thing that imagination leads us into is risk-taking. This species takes risks. We invest in this idea or that idea. We produce this little bit of progress and we find it goes 'tits' up and we abandon it. Then we find this other bit that works and we stick with it. But always taking risks. Man is a gambler. And what is most interesting is that modern man most foolishly and absurdly believes he can shelter from risk. Or rather, we want things that other people do to be safe whilst we ourselves want to take tremendous risks. So we have the kind of dreary people who drink bottled water because they are frightened of tap water but tend to go bungee-jumping while chain smoking.

Here's a medieval picture of paradise, with animals happily living side by side, as though in the Ark. Actually, it is a fantasy to say that man was ever wholly at one with nature. Paradise is not a place, it's an idea. The greatest 'green' fallacy that we have to address is the way modern people are so guilt-ridden about the affluence that they enjoy. Indeed, they are so guilt-ridden that they wish that they could somehow turn the world into some paradisical 'pre-man' state of pristine bliss. The great modern dilemma is this: there are many extremely beautiful places on earth; most places on earth are perfectly survivable; and in the Western world most are in extremely good shape - while all that is true, people feel that their lives are a constant insult against nature. They have erected nature as the perfect pristine 'other' against which all damage is too great to be sustained by nature or our idealism for it.

Now here's a picture of rainforest. It's one of the most mis-reported places on earth. The campaigners and the journalists have already agreed that the rainforest is the absolute icon of pristine purity. It's full of biodiversity. Not that biodiversity is under half as much threat as people say. Never mind, the rainforest is stuffed full of biodiversity, and it is always regarded as fragile. The myth is that you must not do anything to the rainforest: if you fart the whole thing falls down. Now this is nonsense, and the important thing about rainforests almost everywhere in the world is that actually you could log it to your heart's content. The rainforest trees are very much like spinach: they are incredibly quick-growing. Obey a few basic rules, and you could take trees and leave the forest for 25, 30, 40 years - ideally perhaps 50 years - and you have got the same rainforest very nearly that you started with, and then you could go and do it all over again. And of course, it is surrounded by poor people who need a living, and rainforests tend to occur in poor countries which need a living. So they rightly eye their rainforest as a fairly decent resource which they then plunder. Now they plunder it far too much. They overdo it, and they do it in crude ways. It's badly controlled. It's not controlled as though the rainforest was what it ought to be, namely a sustainable crop.

But granted all that, you can actually cultivate 'rainforestry,' and it is mostly done pretty well in a country like Malaysia. This is a picture of Malaysian rainforest. It's green and lush, but it's not virgin rainforest. You are looking at a picture of logged rainforest. So, the most important thing to remember is that environment journalism is driven by dreams and by pictures, and very bad pictures at that. It is often driven by the photographer's understanding of what it is he or she was sent to snap. So when it's a rainforest story, they come back with a smoking ruin of rainforest. But this pretty picture of lush rainforest, which has been logged, is as truly a rainforest picture, but it's counter intuitive. The problem always is the battle against 'T-shirt morality' - the kind you can sloganise on a bit of cotton. Oh, and by the way, the business of biodiversity. Biodiversity doesn't matter in quite the way it's said. But even if it did matter, and even if you decided that biodiversity was the thing you wanted to protect, you wouldn't do it by banning 'rainforestry.' Roughly speaking, you could knock down 80 per cent of the rainforest and still preserve 80 per cent or more of the biodiversity. So the biodiversity argument is not a good one for those who want to preserve the wilderness just for the hell of it. And why the hell do we want to preserve the wilderness? What's so great about the wilderness? Most people would be bored and scared witless by being in rainforest for more than about an hour - maybe two hours. The good bits of rainforest to visit are the bits where somebody has obligingly logged and have put in a road. Otherwise you can't get to it. The other good bit of rainforest is where somebody has very high technical skills and has put up a walkway in the canopy. If you are on the ground in rainforest, you're frightened, uncomfortable, wet, hot and either being bitten or squeezed to death. I think you'd hate it.

You may think you've got to look around the rainforest. It's beautiful seeing these lovely things, you think. Well, this is the best bit of rainforest I saw in a month of cruising around it in Malaysia and it's a river. It looks quite nice, but no nicer than lots of English rivers. However, it is very important as journalists to remember that things matter quite particularly to their neighbours. So, I came back from the Malaysian rainforest and I was writing away about how everybody is wrong about forestry apart from me. And remember, there are only two sorts of journalists. One says: "That bastard is doing something ghastly," and the other sort of journalist says: "That bastard says that that bastard is doing something ghastly, but that bastard is even more ghastly himself," So of course, I got away with my revisionism on the environment because it is at least as amusing as the previous version was terrifying. Providing you are either amusing or terrifying, in any case provided you are shocking in some way, you are going to get paid.

Anyway, I was taking a break from banging away about the rainforest and went for a walk in the wood behind the house where I used to live. And this bastard is chopping it down and I was outraged. He's a very nice man, but he is chopping down my wood. My heart sank. This was an outrage. This wood is nature. This is my symbol of the immortal. This is where I come for solace and sanctuary from the world, and here's this man chopping the damn thing down. And he turns off the buzz saw and we have a cigarette, and he says "Hang on, hang on. I was in this bluebell wood 20 years ago with my dad when he chopped it down, and my son will come in and he'll chop it down in 20 years time. And that's why there are bluebells in this wood, because we keep chopping it down." And of course it's true and I know it. I know it and yet my heart sinks because this is my bit of solace. For my time span, when I am going to be around, I want it without chainsaws in it - I want it in its beautiful mature state.

So when we're out reporting, we can almost be sure to be dealing with 'NIMBY' - 'Not In My Back Yard.' And it's the first move of a journalist - say reporting a new road, or a new factory - to find a nice neighbour and the neighbour says: "It's shocking." You know in your heart of hearts that this person is almost certainly ignorant, stupid or selfish. In one mood, you're glad of a quote or two, and in another you realise the world would grind to a halt if every neighbour could stop every development. And you realise of course, that new roads and incinerators and factories have to get built, and that's why we have democracy. Because in democracy the interests of us all are balanced out: some people have got to take it 'on the chin' because the rest of us need these developments. But never ever, ever forget that when some bastard comes to the end of your road and says: "We're going to do this and that," well, your heart will sink. So there's nothing more reasonable on God's earth than people being 'NIMBY.'

Probably the most beautiful image on earth is Bellini's Madonna in the Meadow - you can see it in the National Gallery. It speaks of what the medieval mind admired and in what the medieval mind took comfort. They took comfort in the progressive works of mankind on the face of the earth, in mankind and God working together. The backdrop is a farm fit for a Madonna: it's a hard-working Italian farm of the day. Actually it's probably been overgrazed and probably the soil has not been replenished by enough fertiliser because they didn't have ICI to do all that sort of stuff for them. And the cow almost certainly has got mastitis. And most of the people in the picture will die young and they've all been poisoned by too many bacteria of the wrong kind. But at least you can say that this is a scene in which we see man working with God for progress, and it is a million miles away from our own perception.

Take a typical Rubens landscape. Here the painter is taking an interest in the wilderness. It's a wild, Low Countries scene, painted in the early 17th century, and it's much wilder than the kind of Arcadian scenes that were fashionable before. It's also one of the first landscape paintings. There were absolutely no customers for it. Rubens couldn't give this stuff away because people said: "Where are the people? This is very boring stuff. There's no human story to it. I've already got that outside my bloody window, can't you do a bit of work - something classical, you know the kind of thing, something with scenes of the human drama?"

Here's a drawing by Humphrey Repton, the landscape designer. It's an estate in Herefordshire in the late 18th Century. The landowner felt: "I've got this quite boring estate, it's mostly farmland, and it's bloody big, but it's quite boring, and I've seen these pictures by the 17th century painter Claude Lorrain. They're of the Italian landscape. What I fancy is something a little bit more natural like that. Not too natural, mind. Don't go mad about it. Just a little bit more natural." And he goes and gets more trees and grassland, and he likes peasants - a few nice peasants and animals grazing - and that will be a bit more natural. And there was another advantage: this is the period of huge political revolution on the Continent, and our English landowners, who have never been stupid, said to themselves: "If we fit in a bit better do you think they'd ever usurp us?" They wrote about this sort of thing, saying, "We need not to be triumphalist about our wealth. We need to be modest in our relations to nature and we need to be modest in our relations to our fellow man, and then we won't be cut down by the guillotine."

So that is the birth of 'picturesque' in Britain. But in about the same period - this picture of Niagara is early 19th Century - the Americans have this huge landscape so they had to learn to love big waterfalls and vast mountains. The painters always put in a cut-down tree, which in effect asked: "Well, should we be proud of man's reforming of the wilderness?" And they always put a nice white man talking to a red Indian as though to say, "Well, our relations with the pre-existing order, the savage and wild world which was here before are quite right, really." They knew they were in a dialogue with the things of the wild and natural.

In effect you have this debate about the meaning of progress, and very tense paintings were produced. So in this period you get the successors of Rubens' pioneering landscapes, you get painting which says, "Wilderness is beautiful." Wilderness used to be ugly, dangerous and frightening, but when we got enough factories going then we thought: "Well, hang on, maybe what we're doing is not so great. Maybe what was there before has quality." And at the same time you could get to the wilderness because transport was easier. That's a big dilemma. Without loggers, there's no access to rainforest. With no roads, there's no visiting Alpine wilderness. No space rockets, no pictures of our little planet. This painting of a road crossing a river in the Alps is late 18th century. It's about whether this road and this bridge - the new bridge versus the old bridge - was a force for beauty and progress, or whether it's an insult against nature. These images are the making of your mind. If we are to talk sensitively and intelligently about the environment, we need to now what bits of it we love and why - and we need to get a handle on our love.

Roads are on the whole all right. We don't build enough of them, probably, in this country, because were incredibly democratic. We must stop believing that 'Swampy' is at last "the people" speaking. There's something much subtler going on. There is a huge democratic pressure for roads in this country and a huge democratic pressure against roads in this country, and each and every one of us can recognise those two processes and impulses in ourselves. The "them and us" business that journalists get into is 'crap.' Every time you hear somebody accused on Newsnight by Jeremy Paxman of doing something for profit, we have to try to ask ourselves: "Why does anybody do anything?" Of course it's for 'bloody' profit and who cares? It's no good half admiring this anti-roads mania and then popping into your car. We ARE that tension within society within ourselves, and the sooner reporters stop setting up phoney antagonisms and start recognising that this is a debate amongst and within ourselves, the better.

This is especially true of industry. Industry is morally neutral. Never, ever, ever blame industry for anything except perhaps being a bit stupid. We can't blame them for being greedy because if they weren't greedy we would have none of the things we want. We cannot blame industry for being what it is.

The business of making roads is a matter which goes to the heart of the problem in journalism. It is constantly tempting to understate and denigrate the normal boring processes of formal democracy. We have an incredibly beautiful planning system in this country. It is highly democratic. It is highly responsive. It is incredibly boring to understand, but before you take a 'pot shot' at it, you will have to go to the trouble of understanding the degree to which planning in this country is a most wonderful device for stopping anything happening. Things happen in this country not because of some 'stitch up' between corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen. Those who 'get things done' face an immense process of hurdle-jumping which makes getting things done extremely hard. That's why we have actually rather few roads. And what's more, the reviled road programme is probably about the least you could get away with. Most of it is designed to relieve bottlenecks; almost all of it will not generate new traffic but will satisfy existing inappropriate traffic and get it onto more appropriate roads.

Never mind that these are unfashionable ideas: they're largely true and it will be your job to pick your way around the sources of information on the matter. The most important thing you could do when reporting the environment is to learn two rules. I'll say them now: one, always call 'the enemy.' When you are absolutely sure that you have identified some bastard company that is doing some grievous activity, don't leave calling them till the last moment. The psychology of calling them at the last minute is very neat. What you are assuming is that you have got to put them in somewhere, say right at the bottom with a sneer. And the less time you give them to get their act together, the less likely it is that they can get anything plausible together. That's fine: it serves your purposes OK. But it doesn't serve the reader, which is all you should actually be thinking about. And two, be careful not to get 'in bed' with one side of the story. Suppose a campaigner comes to you with a story. You are then co-opted; you are virtually 'in bed with this dude.' Remember, campaigners are just like you. They are parasites getting an easy living off the back of people who are out there trying to make the world better. So the campaigner comes to you, and flogs you this stuff. You get excited and think "exclusive," and blah, blah, blah. Before you know where you are, you realise that if you were honest with yourself, you would be embarrassed if there was a good alternative view of this story. But in any case you've sold it by then to a sceptical news editor. You'll tell him: "I've got this story in which I can prove that this bastard is doing x, y and z." The news editor says, "Ah yes - we could run that." And you have been co-opted immediately to your own story because you can't operate in the free and exploratory spirit you should really treasure. You can't afford to discover why your story is absolutely full of shit. You dare not go back to the news editor and say: "Re my discussion with you at 11 o'clock. It turned out to be bollocks. I'm very sorry......" No, you've got yourself wrapped up in this game by now.

Now where is the reader in that situation? The reader is way, way, way down the list of priorities. If you want to be ethical journalists there's one big thing you need to remember. Your contract is with the reader. It's not to scare the reader. It's not even to thrill the reader. It's to inform the reader as best you can. And if you can hang on to a job while honestly keeping at the front of your mind your mission to serve the reader, then you'll be doing very well indeed.

But back to roads and holes in the ground - and on to rubbish. Quarries are pretty. Landfill is great. You will be told all sorts of nonsense about rubbish and especially about how vital it is that you should recycle it. Actually, recycling often means lorries running around half-empty carrying low-value items for recycling, which then uses a huge amount of energy to turn a low-value material into another low-value material. You might just as well toss most of this stuff in a hole in the ground. I love holes in the ground. After all we need the roads and you can only get the roads by having a quarry. Quarries are good for wildlife: the birds love them. Then, bunging the rubbish into the holes has created geography out of junk. It's not a big deal. The Germans and Dutch are trying to bully us into a newish sort of landfill. They want to try to improve landfills. So they said, "We'll have great big bin liners in our landfills, then they won't leak". But if they don't leak, they don't breathe and they don't rot. So that too many landfills are now sitting all around the place with our 'crap' inside doing nothing. This is a very bad idea.

On the whole we should be careful what we produce, and we should get rid of it in our own time and our own space. And we don't necessarily want a nice old-fashioned English landfill, just sitting there with no lid, blasting away, and maybe leaking too much as well. What you can do is a nice mixture of the two, where you encourage lots of air and water into your landfill, but you siphon gas off and you burn it, and stop the leaks you don't want.

Landfill really is a kind of 'mid-range' technology. But it's the kind that neighbours don't like, though if you've been round a well-managed site it's not at all bad. Here's a picture of an erstwhile landfill near Heathrow. It's a farm now. The plants don't know that they're sitting on millions of empty baked beans tins.

Actually, the best thing to do with waste is to burn it. Burning is lovely for waste. It's now becoming quite accepted that the right thing for an 'ex-newspaper' is to burn it. Newspapers are very good fuel for power stations, a bit like plastic. The idea that plastic is horrid and vulgar is nonsense. We should have lots and lots of plastic. We should use more of it. We could have bigger blister packs, more food wrappers. They keep food safe and tidy and nice and fresh in the fridge for ever and ever. And then we'd burn it because it's a very efficient fuel. Oil is too good a chemical not to use it before we burn it. Plastic is too good a fuel not to burn it after we've used it. Incineration is a thoroughly good thing. Don't worry about the pollution: it's all been sorted.

It was sorted out about 20 years ago by a very good parcel of technology, so it's not a big problem. You can burn without fumes, though you do create C02 and add to global warming - but you'd be replacing other sources and in the case of paper, "re-growing" the carbon and in effect locking up the C02 you've created.

Now, here's an image from the control room of the Chernobyl reactor which blew up. Now that accident wasn't good news whichever way we cut it. The control room you see here looks nasty and damaged, by the way, because souvenir hunters stripped it and made it a bit of a wreck. It actually survived the accident pretty well. Now Chernobyl was a classic case where everything conspired to ensure that people talked 'crap.' The journalists, of course, wanted a scare story. This one was great because the Soviets did it. The journalists understood they had got a great story and perhaps they didn't like nuclear anyway. And this one was great because some but not much of the pollution blew our way. We are still not eating lamb off the fields where it fell, and everyone thinks it's because the lambs are dangerously contaminated. What they are is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit contaminated. But we have such strict rules that nobody can eat it. So you can say time and time again: "Sheep in Cumbria are still contaminated and too dangerous to eat." And: "Oh my god, that was years ago it must be terrible." No it's not.

The difficulty is to find anyone talking sense about Chernobyl. The people you obviously go to would be the Ukrainians themselves. But they were terribly poor and they were in a ghastly situation in which they needed large sums of money and they 'polished the begging bowl' by subscribing to the view that their whole terrain was absolutely 'knackered,' and all their people were dying. "It was all completely ghastly; please give us some money." And then of course, you hear about children with damaged brains. And people in the West say, "Right, Chernobyl has been causing this to the children of Chernobyl and let's bring them over to Wales. Give them a nice holiday." And perhaps the children go back to the Ukraine and they think. "God, this is a miserable place to live; I'd rather live in Wales." Now this isn't arguably doing them any favours.

Why this matters is that there have been no birth defects from Chernobyl. It doesn't happen like that. Nuclear pollution doesn't work like that. Radiation doesn't work like that, as we know from Japan. The ground downwind of Chernobyl's radiation is not much contaminated. You get as much contamination from most of the bad areas of Chernobyl and its surrounding terrain as you do from being in Cornwall. Cornwall does worse, if you like, than the rest of Britain, simply because it sits on a more radioactive bit of terrain. We are, after all, just sitting on a huge lump of decaying radioactive material: the earth. So that when I went back to Chernobyl for the tenth anniversary, all I did - and it was wonderfully easy - I just rang the most obvious, serious people I could think of and I said: "Do you know anybody who knows anything about Chernobyl and its aftermath?" And then you quickly find the person who says, "Yes, I've just come back from a visit which is part of a three year UN study project there." And you find technical people who have actually taken the time to know their stuff. And they all, one after the other stood up for the account of Chernobyl that I have very roughly given you now. And I wrote a piece in the Independent on Chernobyl and nobody commented on it. I mean it is a long boring piece. It's honest and true and that's another problem you've got. If you are honest about the environment you'll find that almost everything you write about it is very boring. So you have got to be a very, very good journalist, indeed to somehow make it interesting.

Not one of the Chernobyl story sources came back to me and said I had misbehaved myself. I didn't think they would, because I did something that all of you have often been told you must never, never do because it's an act of cowardice. I promise you this. It's the exact reverse. It's an act of courage, if anything. You should always fax the most difficult material you gather while writing a story to the person who told it to you. Now the merit of this is that they can say: "You don't understand this." Or: "You've got that wrong by a factor of ten." Or "You put that minus sign there instead of a plus sign." Whatever. What they cannot do, and in my experience very seldom try to do, is influence you. They say: "Look, this is just wrong. I didn't say this and I didn't say that." And you say: "Fine. That's your business and I am a bad writer in shorthand, so I'll get that right. Thank you." And then they say: "By the way I think your article is utter bollocks," and you say: "I asked you for facts and information on that and you are within your rights to point out my mistakes. But my interpretations are my problem." And you should apply this faxing business to your enemies, to the bad bastards we talked about earlier. Ask yourself very hard questions whenever you don't do this sort of thing.

Anyway nuclear power hasn't killed half as many people as coal-mining. But then people say: "Oh dear, oh dear: it's the waste, it's the waste. Nuclear waste lasts for ever and ever and ever. Actually, the great thing about nuclear waste is you should dump it, preferably in the deep Atlantic in the case of a good deal of it. That's where nobody ever goes and it's boring and hostile to almost all life and it's radioactive anyway. Greenpeace have made that impossible. There's a great bee in their bonnet.

Now, roughly speaking we always know if Greenpeace don't like something we should immediately think of promoting it. Anyway, even if we can't dump radioactive waste at sea we could find places to bury it on land. Unfortunately there aren't many bits of ground in the UK that are absolutely fabulous for dumping, though there are some. The trouble is they are next to nice rich people who don't like the nuclear industry, say on the east coast. Anyway, it's very hard to get permission to do these things and the only people who like the nuclear industry are the nice poor people who live and work in Cumbria where at Sellafield there's a nuclear site anyway and there's a fence, so that nobody can really complain very much. Cumbria is not absolutely ideal geologically. It's almost certainly all right, but it's not absolutely ideal. The right place to go if only we could pay them to take it would be Sweden where they are awash with rocks.

Now, here's a picture of Shell's operations in the Niger delta, in Ogoniland. Shell are said to be knackering the delta. Actually, they haven't knackered the environment. A good bit of it is mangrove swamp. It was swamp before Shell came and it will be a swamp when Shell leave. As a matter of fact, you couldn't find a quicker, cleaner way of getting huge sums of money into poor countries than they should develop oil. It's an absolute winner.

Now, as it happens, Shell did fall foul of some extremely nasty politics in the neighbourhood and, if you remember, Ken Saro-wiwa was hanged by the Nigerian authorities. It was alleged in Europe that Ken died leading "the people" against Shell and the government of Nigeria. I've spoken to people who knew Ken Saro-wiwa and to others inside and outside Nigeria, and many of them have told me that he was at the very, very least, extremely mischievous as a political operator. There were certainly large numbers, perhaps a majority, of mainstream Ogoni local leaders who strongly disapproved of him. Arguably Ken did indeed incite some of the young people of the neighbourhood to violence, and certainly people associated with Ken and in his "movement" did murder four moderate Ogoni.

Now, whatever you like to say about it, it's a mixed record. It's a difficult picture. It's a murky picture. And Shell's role was in my view not at all a bad one. It wasn't perhaps saintly, but what could Shell do? It could tell the Nigerian government to do this, that and the other, and it probably does constantly say things in private. But if they did what nice 'green' liberals want, Shell would leave Nigeria. But then we would have a hungry, not very attractive regime committed to getting the oil out with whosoever it could find. The new partner would probably be less respectable than Shell, Shell being amongst the most respectable and responsible imaginable. So you'd end up with a less respectable oil company getting oil out of that neighbourhood. What's more, at the very moment that the 'greens' were demanding that Shell leave Nigeria, and the press were full of love for this idea, Shell were just putting the finishing touches to a multi-billion dollar investment which was necessary to reduce the environmental damage that Shell were doing in the Delta. (They had been flaring waste gas, and now want to bottle, ship and sell it).

So, typically of 'green' thinking, at exactly the moment when Shell were putting high risk, big-dollar money into getting the environment and other issues sorted out, the 'greens' said: "This is so immoral you must come out." Well, you can make up your own mind about things like that. No, actually, you can't, not very easily. It's hard to get beyond the clichÈs. I reported this stuff in the Independent, but there is very little fair-minded reporting outside the financial press. When in doubt, read The Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Now, here's a picture of an oil rig in the foothills of the Andes in Colombia, where I went the other day. I did such a good job telling the Shell story to the world that BP took me out to Columbia and made me see all their things there. Very good and excellent people, BP. Actually there's one big distinction in what's happening to BP in Colombia and what's happening to Shell in Nigeria. In Colombia, BP face really drastic violence from predatory guerrillas who have bits of left wing rhetoric and a lot of Mafia habits. BP face this very severe problem and they have to pay the army to patrol, as everybody in Colombia does. You have to do that by law. But the big difference is that the huge amounts of money that Shell put into Nigeria arguably aren't going to a formal government system, and are being squandered because the system is so corrupt. In Colombia, oddly, the first thing that liberal Colombians say to you is: "Thank god for the oil industry, because at least they are getting legitimate dollars into our government." The thing that's wrong with Colombia is that the state is too weak, and Colombians tell me that the Western assumption that the state is always the enemy and is bad is tenable only in countries where the state is so good you can afford to complain about the bits that aren't good. In other countries around the world, what the middle-class and the sensible, respectable or poor long for is a stronger state that works fairly. Colombia is much nearer than Nigeria to be able to take oil revenue and turn it into good government.

One of the things that I beg you to remember, and I touched on it earlier, is that if you are working in one of the great democracies, you must try find out the real merits of the formal system that's in front of you before falling in love with every bit of the informal democracy - every campaigner, every whinger, every victim, or every lawyer who is saying that the state is full of shit. The informal democracy in our country - and the press is a part of it - is a valuable part of society, but it can't ever replace the formal democracy. Unfortunately, the informal democracy operates very often by denigrating the formal processes as though they somehow are inevitably corrupt or work against the people. This is crap. Now I say this here because almost always in environment stories you will be tempted to take a victim - preferably poor - and an oppressor, say big business, and you will say that this is all awful and you will be tempted to blame the capitalist. The important question which is hardly ever asked is: "Who is the formal, government-appointed regulator here and what does the regulator think? Why is this regulator allowing this to happen?" Almost always, it's because he's pretty sure that it wasn't a big problem.

All I beg of you is always to ask, not "Why is this greedy, uncontrolled, villainous industrial bastard doing such things to this victim?" but: "How and by what processes of the formal democracy has it been decided that actually this isn't a bad idea?" It may scupper your story but it will make for wise reading. And if you find the regulator's all to cock, then you really do have a story.

ends