When Oscar, a furry emerald Muppet living in a trash can down Sesame Street coined the phrase ‘it’s not easy being green’, it was a fair description of the environmentalist’s dilemma. A relatively short time ago (by some of your standards anyway!), I grew up with Bert and Ernie’s bathtub exhortations to save water, and Elmo’s to cut down our garbage. That said, these appeals seem to have been more thanks to farsightedness on the part of producers (Sesame Street was one of the first to deal with issues of race and disability too), rather than part of the mainstream discourse.

Remember the bad old days of the late 1980s and early 90s? McDonalds was a novelty, few had heard of GAP, Starbucks or Top Shop, and things like Nike caused wars in shoe shops. On the political side of things, the country was still run by old men with comb-overs and thick glasses. I remember watching them, as a toddler, during a particularly boisterous session of PMQs which happened to have been left on, slightly bemused when told these men ran the country. The slick pr-managed smile had barely been invented yet. Neither, I think, had environmentalism entered the mainstream. Even the arrival of the messiah, ‘pretty straight guy’ Tony Blair didn’t really do that; his climate change promises tended to be regarded by commentators as electoral garnish. A pleasant, if not particularly filling, addition to New Labour’s juicy promises to rebuild hospitals and get the trains running on time.

Of course there were the occasional middle-class one-family crusaders who did their bit, composting food scraps, cycling the kids to school and recycling their bottles, just as there’s always been those who took it further, downsizing to the Shetlands to grow organic veg. But these people on the whole went against the mainstream, not with it. Next Door was by no means hostile; ‘Nice people’ ‘lovely family’, but nonetheless, slightly eccentric. Harmless enough, mind you, but following a different lifestyle choice to the rest of us. They had to put up with the same kind of warm-hearted ignorance and inadvertent condescension that might greet the first black or gay family to move into a sheltered English village. Although, even in todays enlightened times that’s still the reality in many places, ‘the establishment’ view, arguably, has changed substantially. Today even the party of combovers and thick glasses pays homage to Mother Earth.

In 2007, everyone wants to be green just as ardently as everyone wanted a pair of Nikes back in 1990. If you’re in the public eye, it’s not really a choice, it’s an electoral imperative. Green toilet paper, green cars, green wellies, everything in green, even if it isn’t really, and the marketing men can hardly keep up. It’s never been easier to be green as it is now, while you’re hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t possess at least some form of awareness of climate change. For those who have been at the forefront of this movement, that’s a real victory. With David Cameron wily having picked up on it, and every other political party out there scrambling to outbid them for the green vote, ‘green’, sets the agenda like never before. For fear of being lynched, however, I think it’s high time we questioned whether, having brought the debate this far, being ‘green’ is really where we need to be.

Part II on Friday 13th