In the 1970s, it was ignorance, in the 1980s, enthusiasm, and from the 1990s environmental issues were greeted with a peculiar fatalism. Green Agenda, the first popular volume of its type to be published in Wales, confronts head on our ideas of what constitutes 'the environment' and how we perceive it. These essays acknowledge the danger of allowing environmental concern to flourish within a green ghetto, the perils of over-speculation, the banality of 'issues'.

In a developed world where it is political suicide to suggest that we are living beyond our means, and whare established campaign organisations have become obsessed with self-image, Green Agenda suggests new ways of looking at the environment, both in Wales and further afield. Here are the leading environmental writers in Wales addressing matters that affect us all - transport, energy, planning, agriculture. But even as it highlights the importance of established threats such as acidification and increased traffic, Green Agenda anticipates a future in which the most pressing matters will include the consequences of the abandonment of the work ethic in favour of the leisure principle; media pollution, and the ever-expanding ability of computer technology to map and exploit the planet's people and resources. The volume also stresses the meaninglessness of 'environmentalism' if it is not integrated within a local cultural context.

Green Agenda does not pretend to have the answers. But the questions it asks are some of the most important now confronting Wales and the world.

Robert Minhinnick is the prize-winning author of two volumes of essays and seven volumes of poetry. He has also edited a book on the environment in Wales, written for television and provided columns for The Western Mail and Planet. He is the co-founder of the environmental organisation, Sustainable Wales, and is currently the editor of Poetry Wales.