COMMENT No surprise that the EU is not an ‘‘Ecological Union’’ Á a response to Warleigh-Lack Rupert Read* School of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK (Received 5 February 2011; final version received 10 February 2011) This is very much a ‘‘Yes, and ...’’ rather than a ‘‘Yes, but ...’’. For I am strongly in agreement with the broad thrust of Alex Warleigh-Lack’s ‘‘Greening the European Union for legitimacy? A cautionary reading of Europe 2020’’, and hardly in disagreement with anyof its details either. I think that his paper proves conclusively that Europe 2020, like its predecessor documents, is not genuinely environmentalistic, let alone ecologistic. My main point here will be to draw out a little more why this conclusion should not surprise us Á and to propose at the level of political strategy and of ‘‘cognitive policy’’ 1 one way in which we might start to alter this state of affairs, so as to move the EU in the direction of being what it ought to be: an Ecological Union. Warleigh-Lack quite rightly lays out how, in these days of low interest in and low enthusiasm for the EU, its achieving a new role as the foundation of an environmentally or ecologically sound approach to life in Europe offers a possible viable route of new legitimization. After all, it is above all ‘‘green’’ issueswhich know no frontiers; and the EU and its predecessor institutions have had some success in this domain. The inter-national fight in Europe to combat acid rain has led on in recent years to less glamorous but also significant efforts to produce higher environmental standards via EU legislation Á British politicians such as myself know only too well that most environmentally positive law in recent years has originated in Brussels and Strasbourg. But, and it is a big ‘‘but’’: what Warleigh-Lack mentions, but in my viewcould emphasise even more strongly, is that the idea of the EU being focally identified as a body with environmental or ecological aspirations is simply incompatible with what is actually the primary thrust of the EU: economic growth. This is the real issue: so long as one favors economic growth above all else (see for instance the Lisbon agenda), and regards the environment as an added bonus, one will never be genuinely environmentalist, and will never be able to take even the slightest step toward ecologism. 2 The role of the European Roundtable of Industrialists in setting this industrial- growthist agenda is a sorry story deserving to be told. See for instance http:// www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/government/national/ERT.html: the role of the European Roundtable of Industrialists in creating the single European *Email: r.read@uea.ac.uk Innovation Á The European Journal of Social Science Research Vol. 23, No. 4, December 2010, 313Á317 ISSN 1351-1610 print/ISSN 1469-8412 online # 2010 Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences and ICCR Foundation DOI: 10.1080/13511610.2011.563942 http://www.informaworld.com