WHAT is the definition of an environmentalist?

Someone whose policies ruin the environment. When I was growing up, green was a word reserved to describe someone who was stupidly naive.

Now we are seeing in Somerset the truly tragic consequences of the policies of the Environment Agency – a deeply ideological organisation which prefers wildlife, habitat and bio-diversity above the well-being of people.

But we must not run away with the false notion that the natural landscape is wholly natural. We have lived on reclaimed and managed land in this country for a thousand years and, for instance, the well-managed flood plains of the Somerset Levels were created by Dutch engineers – who knew all there is to know about drainage and dykes – during the reign of Charles I.

Properly managed, this is rich farmland.

And it was properly managed for centuries by systematic dredging and, beginning in the 19th Century, the use of pumping stations.

That is until the ideologues in the Environment Agency were given control 18 years ago. They have this naive, green, notion that if nature is left to itself we have paradise on earth. So they stopped dredging and removed the pumping stations.

The Environment Agency’s leader in 2000, Baroness Young of Old Scone, is said to have declared: “I want to see a limpet mine attached to every pumping station.” This is effectually what has happened, to the great discomfiture of the people who live and work on the Levels. To produce the sentimental fairyland of bio-diversity, the Environment Agency’s slogan was: “Just add water.”

Well now, water has indeed been added and we see the results.

Woken belatedly from its dogmatic clumbers, the Government, in that time-honoured bureaucratic practice of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, is bringing back the pumping stations as a matter of dire emergency.

It is time that the country escaped from being in thrall to the politically-correct, treehugging sentimentality of the environmentalists.

Most of this sort are townsmen trying to dictate how countrymen manage the countryside.

They all seem to have swallowed whole Rousseau’s ridiculous myth of the noble savage: leave nature to itself and all will be well. But it won’t and it isn’t.

I’m reminded of the story about the Vicar, passing a parishioner’s beautiful garden and saying: “Oh well done, Mr Smith. What a marvellous job you and God together have made of your garden.” And Mr Smith answered: “Aye, Vicar, but you should have seen the state of it when God had it to himself.”

Our church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, opposite the Old Bailey in the City of London, had trees in the churchyard which simply grew too tall so that they were overhanging the church and dropping their leaves into the gutters which soon became blocked. Imagine my consternation as the priest-in-charge of a medieval masterpiece in glass and stone, a grade one listed building, when I stepped into church one morning to see a torrent like Niagara teeming down the south wall and destroying the ancient fabric.

Naturally, I applied urgently to the Corporation of London to be allowed to trim the trees. Permission was withheld – permanently.

The tree-huggers triumphed and the glorious church suffered tens of thousands of pounds-worth of damage, much of it irreparable.

I have just one question: “Who put the ‘mental’ in ‘environmental’?”