BY coincidence, last Tuesday’s edition of this newspaper featured an intriguing gallery of related environmental snapshots.

It ranged from the race to save the planet from mankind’s influence on climate change, to the obscene amount of usable food we throw away on a daily basis, to an archive photograph of farmers collecting vraic at St Ouen’s Bay.

It also just happened to be a day when driving downhill anywhere in the Island was tantamount to participating in a white-water rafting experience, swept along a cascading cocktail of diluted fertilisers from fields, motor oil from roads and goodness knows what else spilling out from building sites, gardens and inadequate drains, all flowing towards the outfalls and the mussel beds off our Ramsar-threatened shoreline.

Let me join up the dots. First, the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. Almost as much man-made political heat has been generated by the conference chamber as has been belched into the atmosphere of our planet.

From the crusading eco-warriors to the diminishing though obdurate ranks of those in denial, the evidence of the damage to our natural environment is at least now being taken seriously. Don’t, however, be surprised to discover a convenient set of escape routes carved under the polemics when it comes to hard choices.

Whatever gloss is put on the causes for the predicament we now all face, or indeed what form of the Damascus Road revelation actually brought the delegates scurrying to the decks of the listing conference ship, the salient fact remains that the climate is warming up, the ice is melting and the seas are rising. At the same time, we are dumping billions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere. It wasn’t there before, but it is now.

Closer to home, we have a waste disposal mountain of our own. The first time I heard that we (UK figures) throw away a third of all the food we buy, I refused to believe it. But our local figure of 20,000 tonnes beggars belief and is a crushing indictment of our obsessive consumerism.

I applaud the Consumer Council’s ‘idiot guide’ to avoiding waste, though conspicuous by its absence from the list was a warning not to be seduced by the ‘buy one get however many else free’ offers which contribute so significantly to our buying addiction.

Of course the supermarkets want to clear their shelves on a daily basis – that’s how they increase turn-over, which accounts for profit. You can’t argue with that. The problem is, of course, that simple through-put doesn’t have much to do with efficient use of natural resources. How often have we read of supermarkets in the UK turning away good local produce because they buy cheaper stuff from abroad?

So up goes the carbon footprint of consumption and out of business goes another raft of local industry, which, when self-sufficiency is forced upon us just won’t be there to supply the nation.

We have become so obsessed with sell-by dates – which frankly only act as a legal safeguard for suppliers in the food industry, not a consumers’ edict – that we’ve adopted a knee-jerk reaction to the flap of the waste-bin. Sadly, the convenience of the supermarket shelves and the home freezer has done much to eradicate prudence and larder management.

There is, of course, a place for both, but think back a generation or so when there was just a weekly shopping trip.  OK, there wasn’t such a daily menu choice, but meals were strategically managed, more was recycled and the population was not on the whole under-nourished.

Which brings me to the St Ouen’s beach vraic gatherers, collecting a rich harvest of natural fertiliser in 1938, and the torrents of surface water draining off the land today.

Commercial pressures have driven us to a dependence on artificial pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and additives, all releasing alarming amounts of CO2 during production. Our demand for cheap, faster-growing crops, available on demand, has wreaked havoc with growing seasons on a global basis.

Has the taste of our own renowned Jersey Royals really improved all that much since they were fertilised by the natural oils spread across our sun-drenched vergées?

Obviously, I can’t judge that, but I can offer a salutary comparison. In south-west France, where I am privileged to spend my summer away-days, the famous oyster beds off Arcachon were closed for several weeks this summer because of damage caused by parasites thriving on pollution in the water flowing into the bay from the over-use of commercial fertilisers in the vineyards surrounding the Gironde estuary.  It was a devastating blow to the local economy and way of life, and caused more Gallic sucking of air through governmental scientific teeth and political name-calling than ever greeted Thiery Henri’s ballistic guidance system.

It also serves as a warning of how we pour inorganic chemicals and processed waste into the ground with no regard to the consequences.

So it is all linked. In our increasing race to produce more to consume, we discard more than we need, and all the time we taint and chip away at the irreplaceable reserves built up over millennia. There is no reason to beat ourselves up for capitalising on technological advances. We do not wish to return to living in mud huts, foraging and living on subsistence diets.

But there is no reason why we shouldn’t ask ourselves serious questions about how we manage the resources which sustain us, in order that they will still provide for successive generations.

And then actually go out and do something about it.