Gordon Brown has delivered his first big speech on the environment, and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, has given warning that if humanity doesn’t tackle climate change it will be “on the verge of a catastrophe”.

But does such high-level agonising encourage citizens to push for collective political action? No, according to Andrew Szasz, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Instead, he suggests that repeated pronouncements have bred a “strange, new mutant form of environmentalism” in which we protect ourselves through the stuff we consume. He calls this isolationist behaviour “inverted quarantine”.

So, if we suspect toxins in the environment, we buy organic food and bottled water in a bid to protect ourselves, instead of campaigning for toxin levels to be reduced for all. In the face of rising crime, we retreat nervously into expensive gated communities instead of pushing for safer streets.

These individual responses to threats, Szasz argues in a new book, Shopping Our Way to Safety, militate against political action. “We become anaesthetised. People believe they’ve solved the problem, therefore they’re less likely to line up and advocate for more political responses.”

I have long thought the individual purchase of carbon offsets a waste of money; now I can intellectualise my parsimony.

— I wrote last week that some scientists believe that social housing should be built in rich areas to improve the long-term health of the poor. This greatly displeased many readers; one wrote that affluent areas would quickly become “effluent areas”. Others commented that, having escaped a childhood of chavdom, they had no desire to be reintegrated with “the lazy and indolent”. The alternative is to build all social housing in one place. Or, to put it another way, ghettoisation. Does that sound any better?

— Before you go thinking that this column has turned into Sociology Notebook, let me steer you to the subject of stem cells. I am dismayed at the publicity surrounding Professor Ian Wilmut’s decision to abandon therapeutic cloning (the cloning of human embryos in order to extract embryonic stem cells that can be grown into any tissue type). Wilmut, the co-creator of Dolly the sheep, explained that his decision was not reached for ethical reasons; instead, a Japanese team has found a better way of churning out stem cells, using fragments of skin.

Yet his decision was presented as a moral victory for pro-life groups. “At last scientists are starting to see reason,” one campaigner said.

Wilmut, in fact, insists that therapeutic cloning must not be stopped and has urged parliamentarians not to tighten research restrictions. I expect he now regrets making so much of his decision.

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