I’d like to echo Tom Pashby’s rebuttal of a previous letter from Prof Christine Wheeler McNulty.

In the words and mindset of Prof Wheeler McNulty (People before planet, Letters, May 31) politicians need to stop ‘putting the planet before the people’.

That makes as much sense as being on a ship hurtling towards an iceberg, advising not to bother veering the ship off course away from it, but carry on playing charades.

Hello Prof Wheeler McNulty? The planet is the people on it!

She patronisingly asks us not to be alarmed by ‘eco-anxiety’, a phenomenon confined to the impressionable youngsters, distraught by the harrowing environmental degradation around them.

‘Their brains are still developing,’ she assures us.

Exactly. Their minds are alive and kicking unlike some.

Perhaps they are also a bit concerned as predictions of the world they will inherit long after Prof Wheeler McNulty has gone are dire.

Tom is right: we’ve had the shot across the bows; we know the rubric. The challenge now is to convert rhetoric into real action on the ground to make tackling climate change happen.

Introduce fiscal incentives to re-use and reduce waste; cut car journeys; live sustainably.

Dave Degen

Whippendell Road, Watford