A princely embarrassment

When I first read Prince Charles' comments about the dangers of scientific rationalism and the horrors of genetically modified crops, I expected him to have an immediate media and public following. After all, most people distrust GM (genetically modified) food, worry about the power of modern science and think we're destroying the environment. The themes that Prince Charles discussed are also popular ones. Respecting nature, curbing human excess and following our instincts are sentiments that many people feel to be perfectly reasonable.

But, contrary to expectation, no massive outpouring of sympathy for the Prince's views was apparent. Jonathan Porritt in the Guardian and Normal Tebbit in the Mail on Sunday were predictably supportive of the Prince's anti-GM stance. But countless other commentators, writing in a variety of publications, were rather sniffy of his quest for the rural idyll and dismissive of his criticisms of modern science. Meanwhile, environmental pressure groups and anti-GM campaigners were noticeably absent from the debate which followed Charles' Reith Lecture.

Part of the reason is that Prince Charles' reasons for embracing the natural and eschewing the artificial are different from those of most environmentalists. Charles is a Christian: he believes that 'there is a sacred trust between mankind and our Creator, under which we accept a duty of stewardship for the earth'. Many greens are not.

But Charles' apparent isolation is also a result of who he is. Environmentalists are often accused of having middle-class, first world preoccupations that the rest of the world can ill afford. But this takes the biscuit. The addition of a bored royal to their ranks is likely to be more of an embarrassment than a boon to the greens.

The lesson of the day seems to be that it matters greatly who your proponents are. There is probably rather a lot of public sympathy for Prince Charles' view of science, but few feel the urge to shout from the rooftops in his defence. Ironically, Charles' boredom is due to science: increased life expectancy (a feature of modern science and medicine) has kept him out of a job for perhaps longer than Nature intended.