Letter: The future of environmental policies as the Green Party falters

Sir: So, vale, Green Party. Sara Parkin and Jonathon Porritt have dealt the death blow to anything that remained of its public credibility and the media are writing the official obituary, but the truth is that it began to die in 1989, at the moment of its greatest - and only - triumph.

Only one real question remains. Will Green politics die with it?

There has never been serious public examination of the fundamentals of its analysis. In our navety, those of us who worked on the European election campaign believed that a significant result would achieve that end. At its core lies the self-evident truth that the earth is all we have, and that it therefore makes good sense to take care of it.

Accept that the earth is our common home and it follows that humanity is one family. Family members take care of each other, and try to ensure a decent future for their children. Simplistic? Utopian? The recent UN/EC sponsored conference on the former Yugoslavia began by formulating 'Principles of Civilised Behaviour'. These were ours.

Many of us stayed in the Green Party because, despite its manifest faults - and, believe me, how it looks from the outside is as nothing compared to what it is like inside - it was the only political vehicle rooted in these ethics. Who else had the courage and the vision to start from a bedrock of principle? Who else dared to dream?

If I had not already quietly allowed my membership to lapse, I would be leaving the Green Party now. It is no longer the party I joined and worked for. Perhaps it never was, but it will now retrench, officially, to an anarcho-socialist splinter group. I remain a Green who wants to work for Green politics. Where do I, and thousands like me who wouldn't be seen dead in a bobble hat and whose minds are far from woolly, go now?

Yours sincerely,

LINDSAY COOKE

Isleworth, Middlesworth

The writer co-ordinated the Green 2000 initiative which brought about the organisational changes agreed by the party conference last year.