How times have changed for the environmental movement. It was just over three years ago that David Cameron grabbed the headlines when he called for a focus not just on GDP (gross domestic product) but also on GWB (general well-being). For many environmentalists, this was the biggest breakthrough of their lifetime, the first time a mainstream British politician had ever rejected economic growth as the central goal of economic policy.

Not long after, Zac Goldsmith, the 34-year-old son of the late business tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, became the unlikely Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park. He is a radical green revolutionary and the director of The Ecologist, a magazine that makes The Guardian look like a rabidly