Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.

I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past.

Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.

Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.

There are many who would much prefer that the word 'climate' never be mentioned and that the issue be eliminated from our national conversation.

With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.

I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.

We need to go after cancer, diabetes, climate change, the substantive problems of the world that, if were solved, would create immense wealth and opportunity that would cascade across countries.