25/1/18: Some have expressed confusion about this idea, that the left wasn’t associated with environmentalism. It’s not that simple, but things have changed. Remember that the first moves to combat climate change were initiated in the late ’80s – by Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher-Reagan axis, through their blind support for corporate capitalism, did plenty to harm the environment, but at the same time, conservation used to be much more of a conservative issue than it is now. And certainly in radical left circles, environmentalists were often dismissed as politically suspect hippies. Someone from the Revolutionary Communist Party attempted to recruit me in the early ’90s, but I was disgusted by their rampantly anthropocentric disregard for ecological issues. ↩