From local news we see protesters at Hinkley Point again, with over 200 people blockading the Hinkley plant to protest at plans for a new wave of nuclear power stations.
"This blockade shows that people who understand the true dangers of nuclear power are prepared to use civil disobedience to get their voice heard....The Government has hoodwinked the public into believing that we need nuclear power to keep the lights on. But this is totally untrue." said Andreas Speck of the Stop New Nuclear Alliance.
Whether or not nuclear power is dangerous or not is a discussion for another day, although there's an excellent article by Clive Wakely over on BNP Ideas that is well worth a read.
Instead, it's time to take a look at the obvious elephant in the room, impacting nearly all environmental issues, and why it would logically follow that environmental campaigners should support nationalist policy in at least one area.
That area is immigration, and resultant population growth, and it is an issue too often ignored in environmental debate.
If we ask ourselves a simple question, what is one of the major driving forces in the need for more electricity, more gas, more housing, creating more waste and so on?
It is obviously population, more people = more resources needed. That is a simple truth, the more people we have the more demand there will be for the resources available, and the more pressing the need will be to create more of those resources.
Be it the need for additional power, or the need for extra housing, or just more landfills for rising amounts of refuse, increasing population will be a significant factor.
Population growth in the UK is driven by two significant factors - immigration and immigrant birth rates.
We find a huge additional population entering via our borders, and once they are here we find that many immigrant groups have significantly higher birthrates than the indigenous population.
Current figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) put us on course to pass 70 million people by 2029, and some estimates say that we will be the most populous country in Europe by 2050.
As we've already said, and who can argue with the fact, increasing population creates increasing demand for everything.
We can come up with all sorts of creative - more environmentally friendly or green to use the popular terminology - ways to meet that demand, but we cannot do so indefinitely nor do so overnight.
At some point we have, inevitably, to reach the conclusion that we have to make a choice between environment and population, we cannot have both.
A most obvious example is housing, people require housing. We can decide to label new housing as environmentally sustainable or whatnot, but the fact is that housing still occupies land, something of which we have a finite amount.
More and more of that land ends up as housing to accommodate an increasing population, something which should be of obvious concern to all environmentalists out there.
Some may argue that there is currently plenty of land, it is just that ownership is distributed unevenly, but that is a moot point. When do we draw the line, when 25% is concreted over, 50%, 100%? We'll have to draw that line somewhere, or prepare ourselves for the day when nothing is left.
Again, we can look at that great polluter, the car. More people leads to more cars and more travel, therefore more pollution. What odds does it make if we reduce harmful emissions from vehicles by say 50% if our increasing population leads to 50% more vehicles and travel?
We end up with a zero win situation, an obvious gain in terms of reducing pollution is cancelled out by ever increasing numbers of people.
The same holds true in so many situations, potential progress in environmental areas, at best, is rendered partially (or wholly) irrelevant by increasing population.
In worse case scenarios ever increasing population causes environemntal demands that are impossible to offset in any way.
For many instances we can reduce things to a simple statement and choice - environment or population, we cannot have both.
The most obvious criticism of this statement would be that by increasing efficiency and providing greener methods of creating all the resources which Britain needs, we can reduce environmental impacts.
However, we can easily see the fallacy there, we're simply trading larger impacts for a lot more smaller ones, the sum adds up to the same, or worse.
Much as many may be loathe to admit it, the heart of any drive for Britain to be sustainable, green, environmentally friendly, or whatever the buzzword of the day is, has to include the population factor and consider ever increasing population as an environmental threat.
Preventing our population from reaching unsustainable levels is, quite evidently, the environmentally friendly thing to do.
