“Whereas the political salience of greenery has wilted,” you argue in your article about environmental politics in Britain, “the government’s environmental policies are holding up” (“A Lighter Shade of Green,” May 7, 2011). Put simply, the government is still doing what the voters have pushed out of their minds on account of the recession. Comforting, this. “The government knows that making too much of its environmentalism risks alienating squeezed voters,” you warn. “The worry for greens is that the lack of political utility in their cause will ultimately prompt the government to water down environmental policy itself.” But a good number of greens have given up all hope already. Even in the middle of the last decade, when environmentalists were in their “political pomp,” as you put it, it was clear to many of them that any sort of government action to protect the environment was too little, too late. By the end of the decade, the remaining hope has evaporated. Keith Farnish’s Time’s Up! (2009) sums up the hopelessness case pretty well: forget about politics and focus on what you can do yourself, for it is a matter of survival.