In 1970 the heavy rock band Iron Butterfly, made famous by their chart-topping album ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, produced a much softer ballad, ‘Slower than guns’. The lyrics included the lament: “Miles and miles of gasoline fumes, in the the air like transparent tombs ...”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donovan was singing: “We’re on a spaceship, you may not think so. Don’t pour filth into rivers, rivers are like the blood in our veins. Don’t pour filth into the air, air is the best thing that we can breathe”.

Over in Germany, Petra Kelly and friends launched Die Grünen, one of the first Green Parties and the first one to get candidates into parliament on a pro-environment platform. The green movement was up and running.

Nevertheless, it has taken all this time for fair dinkum environmental awareness to permeate the main-stream media. Words once spoken only by greenies and smoke-befuddled hippies are now used unashamedly by conservative political speech writers.

You might think that with a track record for prescience, environmentalists would have an acknowledged role in society and be a part of future government policy development. Alas, this seems not to be so. In fact, greenies are treated by government, industry and the main-stream media with as much suspicion as ever.

Of course the green movement is a broad-brush church. It has within its ranks people with all sorts of axes to grind. There are the party socialists, still waiting for the workers to rise up, trying hard not to look like station masters while holding a red flag in one hand and a green in the other.

There are back-to-the-land zealots who espouse self-sufficiency but ignore the millions of Earth’s citizens living in cities who will never be able to connect with the land except by exchanging their wages for supermarket food. For many others being green is an attitude rather than a way of life.

Recently, a new breed has emerged – the commercial greenie. Companies are springing up to take ‘carbon conscience’ money from subscribers, with feel-good slogans like, “It’s easy to be green”. The money is used to give away energy efficient light bulbs, low-flow shower heads or to plant trees. Some of these companies have already gone bust.

The environment does have a measurable value which can be traded. The trap is in thinking that money can be used to ameliorate environmental pollution. We cannot buy or trade our way out of this one.

The voice of the greenie is being muffled still by the captains of the fossil-fuel industry and their tame supporters today just as it has been for over three decades.

Investment in and research into renewable energy generation is an area where the government continues to lag way behind popular opinion.

Most people now see that the promise of ‘clean’ coal and ‘safe’ nuclear reactors is mere gobbledegook put out by a desperate industry buying time and hoping for some technological miracle to appear.

I don’t want, in another thirty years time, to be sitting in my rocking chair chatting with the grandchildren, lifting our respirators to sip a little of the daily water ration and hearing them say, “Pops, when did you first know all this was going to happen?”