Our esteemed editor has drawn my attention to the word ‘ecocide’. It was employed by the Greens Party’s treasury spokesman Nick McKim. What can I tell you about ‘ecocide’? First, the unhappy truth that it appears in the august pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. It made its first appearance in print in an Ohio newspaper in 1969 in an article about pollution which talked about ‘ecocide – crimes against humanity by destruction of the environment’.