Part of the problem?

I am, you are, we all are. That seems to be the implications of the new vulgar value system emerging in Britain's urban middle classes.

Yesterday I watched a video interview given by a director of 'low-impact' fashion firm Howies shot in a very bare looking Cardiff apartment. I suppose, he suggested, that just because we make things, we are part of the problem.

This is the problem as conceived by timid post-Thatcher city dwellers who tend to work in service industries and have generally never grown or made stuff in their lives. Increasingly they are inclined to regard the natural world as the primary source of meaning and value, or worse still, 'spirituality'.

In a world thus conceived, most human beings and most productive human activities are essentially a contaminant.

This philosophy is a bit of a low-carb, organic version of the more intensely felt (and realised) ideas in Puritanism, German Romanticism and other forms of post-Enlightenment irrationalism, such as Facism. And it's only a step away from Bond-baddy think: save the polar bears by eliminating all the surplus, non-elite burger eaters.