Greens grow bigger - but not always for the better

It has come as a shock to someone who, beneath his bald, grey-fringed pate, still feels about 26, but they have started pinning the V-word on me.

It happened when the girl from radio's PM programme asked if she should describe me as "eminent". No, no, I demurred; my only distinction was in having covered the environment for a long time. "Then I'll call you 'veteran'," she decided. And thus, despite my attempts to backpedal, it went out.

I suppose it's fair enough. I have just passed my twentieth anniversary writing about the field for national newspapers. I remember the first day, in more leisurely times, when I rose from my desk at another Sunday paper after six o'clock to find the office deserted and the doors locked: I had to puzzle my way out through the print room.

But that was at the beginning of the week. On the Friday, when my wife picked me up well after midnight, she anxiously asked if I would be so late again. Of course not, I assured her, I was just settling in. So, as the midnight oil seems to be alight, not just on Fridays but for more and more of the week as the years pass, I must be more inexperienced than ever.

o MY FIRST story tip came from the Ramblers' Association on a campaign to establish a long-distance footpath along the banks of the Thames. The plan was flatly opposed by the official Countryside Commission, because, as it told me, the route did not go through "the right sort of countryside".

So earlier this year I relished a slightly self-congratulatory press release from the self-same body about the same 180-mile Thames Path, which it finally established 14 months ago. The once-despised route was receiving "amazing interest" from tourists showing how "attractive" it was.

My next story was on the launch of the first bottle banks. These were a roaring success from the start (one old boy brought four van loads of beer bottles, the residue of 20 years of lubrication) and at the last count there were 20,056 scattered round the country. They are memorials to probably the most successful counterstroke ever mounted against a green campaign.

At the time, Friends of the Earth - which had launched itself by taking bottles back to Schweppes under the slogan "Don't Schh... on Britain" - was close to getting legislation to make bottles returnable. This threatened to cut the manufacturers' production: hence their masterstroke.

The bottle banks they introduced assuaged public guilt at throwing away bottles (which was fuelling the environmental group's campaign) while allowing the makers to go on churning out just as many as before, now using the recycled glass. The only resource saved was sand - not exactly in short supply. Friends of the Earth was outmanoeuvred, not least because it had been flattered into accepting an invitation to join a government committee studying returnable bottle legislation (which reported, inconclusively, years later) agreeing, in return, to stop campaigning on the ground.

o THIS was, come to think of it, an early sign of one of the most striking trends of these past 20 years: the corporatisation of the environmental pressure groups. They have grown astonishingly - put together they now have well over 5 million members, more than twice as many as all the political parties combined. But they have also grown in complacency.

Their prime concern now is often building their own organisations, preferably at the expense of other environmental groups (sometimes internally dubbed "the opposition") rather than fighting the causes they sell to their supporters. One recent campaign by a major group, launched with the usual rhetoric about saving the world, had the real object of raising its "public recognition factor" by one percentage point. It flopped.

These are now big organisations, carrying much public trust and raking in vast amounts of money from public subscription. They need watching just as closely as the industries they often stigmatise. But - and I have the bruises to prove it - they frequently react to criticism far more intemperately than all but the most obtuse companies.

o SOME groups try to combat increasing impersonality with Hague-style encounter days. When Friends of the Earth held one recently, its office was deserted: no one could be contacted there, by mobile phone, by pager or even by emergency numbers. The encounter ,I almost forgot to tell you, was called Communications Day.