Dust storm in a buttercup

POLLUTION SEEMS SURE of a place among the top ten public relations campaigns of the century. Of course, it has enormous attractions as an issue. It has considerable emotional appeal for a start: images of unhealthy people breathing foul air in monstrously distorted countryside laid waste by generations of conspicuous consumption. It is also easy to become an instant self appointed expert, blandly rolling ecological disasters off the tongue with the cultured facility of the man reading out the football results on the television. The subject is so enormous that it is relatively easy to talk non‐stop for several hours in splendidly esoteric, unconstructive generalizations. And, dare one say it, the cynics among us have spotted its potential application as a genuine blockbuster of a political red herring. William Davis said recently in Punch that the British seem to need a crisis. If all else fails, or if we have a real crisis so nasty that we don't wish to discuss it, we can always rely on environment, pollution and ecology to turn up trumps.