Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2013-10-09-Speech-3-187-000"
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"en.20131009.27.3-187-000"2
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"Mr President, over the weekend I went for a long walk in my constituency. I was consciously hoarding the retinal images against what I knew would be a long week in the European Parliament.
I strolled across the broad chalk fields of North Hampshire and I could not help but notice that the environment was cleaner than it has ever been. There are more trees in Britain than at any time since we started chopping them down for the first wave of the industrial revolution; there are birds of prey circling overhead – a very rare sight in my boyhood – otters have returned to the rivers; there are salmon and trout in the Thames. The environment keeps getting cleaner. You would not think that listening to the tone of the debates in this place.
We seem to have some hardwired part of our brains that makes us determined to think that we are on the brink of a catastrophe. But the stubborn facts speak for themselves. We in the West are breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water than at any time before. And what has done that? Property. Capitalism. Trade. It was Marxism that taught that nature was a resource to be exploited. A vision that found brutal realisation in the smokestack industries of Eastern Europe.
The best thing to have happened to the environment was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cheer up! Things keep getting better."@en1
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