Where Hungry Hill runs into the sea there is a small promontory and beach called Ardagannive or Sandmount. I was drying off after a swim there a month ago when I was introduced to local teacher Ann O’Sullivan. After the initial spar over my notorious letter about the teachers’ strike (‘Sack ‘em all’ – with others, on my website this week) she told me a great story about James Lovelock and her family’s involvement with him and his work. Lovelock, undeniably one of the founding fathers of the modern Green movement, invented the Electron Capture Detector. This allowed the tiny parts-per-million measurements that led to the discovery of DDT and other chemical traces in animal fats and the environment. His work led to Rachel Carson’s seminal, ‘Silent Spring’. The pioneering scientist came to the Beara Peninsula in the ‘70s and converted a stone barn in Adrigole into an Exponential Dilution Chamber. Quite a change-of-use from its previous life as a cow-shed! Ann’s late father, a sheep farmer, deeply appreciated by Lovelock for his intelligence, became his assistant in experiments that went on to refine the global monitoring of CFCs and other pollutants. 
There are thousands of websites on Lovelock but one of the best is his biographical acceptance speech for the Blue Planet award in 1997. www.gn.apc.org/resurgence/issues/lovelock187.htm.

In the last issue I mentioned www.purefood.org.  On the next page, David Storey had an item ‘American Paranoia’ based on www.purefoods.org.  To clarify for some of my emailers; ‘purefood’(singular) are the goodies, run by the Organic Consumer’s Association, with their Monsanto Watch and Organic Food News pages – ‘purefoods’(plural) are the baddies, as you would soon realise from their colourfully-titled home page article, ‘The Pure Fools Campaign – Exposing the Organic Food Industry’s Attempt to Scare us into Buying Their Food’. Having a slightly different title to your target and thus detouring mistyping surfers your way is a favoured tactic of propagandists and pornographers on the web.

Another entertaining example of the genre is, www.altgreen.com.au?misc/honours00.html   whose lively language includes such gems as, ‘anti-biotech ratbaggery’. It also has the contents of Prof. Trewavas’ (our good Noreen Gibney’s nemesis?) infamous letter that has cost the hapless Scot his reputation and the Glasgow Herald a packet (see my site News &Comment page, 3^rd and 11^th October).

Ever heard of a good bank - perhaps one that might leave you with the proverbial umbrella when it starts to rain? Triodos, the Dutch bank founded by hippies, is a bank with heart – so we were eloquently told by Matthijs Bierman at the IOFGA conference in Killarney. They now have a very able Irish representative, Kieran Kennedy, and plan to have an actual bank branch here before very long. www.triodos.co.uk.
I’d guess that, although green they may be, they’d spot a chancer a kilometre away.