Dominic Lawson: Some hints for saving the world

Every age has its prophets, moral philosophers who have a unique vision of the good life. Many of them die unrecognised – or even ridiculed – by their contemporaries. One such neglected moralist of our age is Ethan Greenhart, an aptly named environmentalist – although the first seven letters of that word might be redundant in his case.

Greenhart ploughs a lonely, but ecologically impeccable, furrow on an obscure website called Spiked. Later this month, however, his collected thoughts are to be made available in print under a characteristically thoughtful title: Can I Recycle My Granny?

Ethan Greenhart's concern for the environment and the threat of anthropogenic climate change takes him well beyond conventional responses such as carbon trading, low energy light bulbs and loft insulation: in common with a growing number of green activists, he sets out an agenda designed not for the benefit of mankind, but allegedly for the planet itself – which for some reason he thinks is a girl called Gaia. In fact, he has dedicated his new book to her.

The author is an admiring supporter of the Optimum Population Trust – Sir Jonathon Porritt and Professor John Guillebaud are among its notable patrons – which demands that this country takes immediate steps to reduce our population to less than a third of the current level. Like Sir Jonathon, Ethan Greenhart has two children. Although this is only two-thirds the size of Professor Guillebaud's brood, Greenhart is characteristically troubled by his apparent hypocrisy; as he points out, "When you 'sprog up', as some insist on calling it, you are not only creating a cute baby with fair hair and a gummy smile, you're also producing a future Scud missile of carbon use, who will strike at the very heart of Mother Earth".

"I do love my kids," the author confesses, "but I can honestly say that I hate having had them. And not a day passes when I don't tell them what a burden they are to the planet." From the start, Mr and Mrs Greenhart – or Ethan and Sheba, if you prefer – have done everything possible to atone for their incontinent breeding. They never put nappies (not even reusable ones) on their children, but let the poo fall where it may; then it would be used as fertiliser in the allotment at the back of their eco-cottage in Kent.

As Greenhart writes, with a pardonable pride: "Their nutrient-rich and juicy baby poo sank into the soil and enriched our lentil plants, beetroots and turnips; then Sheba and I harvested these vegetables to make slow-cooked organic baby food for the children. In effect, our children ate, recycled and then re-ate the same meal – Lentil, Beetroot and Turnip Surprise for the first three years of their lives." What lucky children!

Some of Greenhart's readers have asked him why he and his wife did not choose to adopt children, rather than add to the billions already on the planet – and to do so from Africa, to save one or two little mites from possible starvation. He replied that it is the height of eco-irresponsibility to uproot babies who live supremely ethical lives in the Third World – where their homes are made of mud and their water is drawn from wells – to bring them to a country where houses are made with concrete and the water comes laden with chemicals out of taps.

The Greenharts' friends Margo and Zac have, nevertheless, managed to show that adoption can be combined with minimal carbon emissions: their Chinese children Zi and Lei spend between six and eight hours a day at work on rice crops in a specially installed paddy field in their Gillingham back garden. Greenhart notes admiringly: "This is their staple food, just as it would have been if they had stayed in that orphanage in Xinjiang."

Perhaps one reason why Ethan and Sheba committed the crime of perpetuating their family's footprint on long-suffering Gaia is that they have been unable to find a form of birth-control that meets the highest ecological standards. Ethan recoils with shock from the proposition that he wrap his penis in a piece of spermicide-covered rubber that – in his words – "takes years to biodegrade as it floats from our sewage system into the weeping blue sea".

Neither does he endorse the idea that condoms be made widely available in Africa for medical reasons. In fact, he endorses the remarks made in the 1990s by members of the green campaigning organisation known as Earth First: "If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS." Or, as Greenhart asks of one of his readers puzzled by his one-man prophylactic boycott: "Might humankind's use of condoms be foiling Mother Nature's desperate-but-understandable attempts to correct over-population through disease?"

Perhaps the only correspondents who truly live the good life as prescribed by Ethan Greenhart are those whose sexual inclination can never lead to further exhaustion of long-suffering Gaia's resources. To Paul of Bournemouth, enquiring about the most eco-friendly way of celebrating a civil partnership, Ethan enthuses: "First of all, let me congratulate you on being a homosexual... you have mastered the art of sex without consequences, whereas every time a man lies with a woman he runs the risk of creating what one eco-feminist correctly calls 'a screaming shit machine': another screeching greedy toddler to be adorned in the latest Burberry jumpsuit and Christian Dior bib."

I would recommend that you go out and buy Can I Recycle My Granny? – were it not for the fact that, as Greenhart guiltily admits, every copy is a horrific mish-mash of wood pulp and chemically enhanced dyes known as "ink". For shame, Hodder!

On the other hand, rest assured that the words contained in it were ethically produced, as the author's home computer is charged by a treadle pump in his cellar worked by his two children. I wonder if they realise how privileged they are to have such a richly comic father.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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