Sir: In 'Green grows the Rousseau-O!' (12 August) James Bowman
says we need someone to trace the intellectual genealogy of environmentalism back to the philo- sophers of the French Revolution.
Surely what we need is someome to trace this genealogy to wherever it is to be found. And surely Anna Bramwell in Ecology in the 20th Century, A History, published this year, has done just that. Dr Bramwell does not disagree with Mr Bow- man, but she finds the roots of environ- mentalism far more complex and wide- spread than he suggests.
As a farmer endlessly bullied by environ- mentalists, it is of immense interest to me to learn from Dr Bramwell's book that Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, was a homeopath, naturalist and green to his eyebrows, and that Walther Darre, his minister of agriculture from 1933 to 1942, was a bio-dynamic fanatic.
J. R. Boyden Chebbard Farm, Cheselbourne,
Dorchester, Dorset
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