The problem that committed environmental campaigners share with their socialist counterparts is that the most persuasive elements of their programme have been politically mainstreamed.
They are left with the less palatable hardcore, to which the public is indifferent or hostile. The green-command economy is no more sustainable than the socialist version.
Ireland is fortunate to have a favourable natural environment, blessed with beauty and fertility and a temperate climate. The weather station at Valentia still provides a base against which air pollution in Western Europe can be measured.
The intensification of development has increased the environmental challenge on top of previous infrastructural underdevelopment.
Environmental organisations can share pride in much progress. Fifty years ago, our towns and cities were drab and run down, with overcrowded housing and slums. As these were tackled, environmental protests limited wanton destruction of heritage, and mostly prevented the hearts of cities from being ripped out for the sake of the car.
Air pollution has been successfully tackled, the overall deterioration in water pollution arrested, and a huge effort put into cleaning up amenity waters such as Dublin Bay and the Lakes of Killarney.
Broadleaf planting has been encouraged. The scourge of the plastic bag has been overcome. Most public places will soon be smoke-free zones. Public parks are mostly kept to a high standard.
There is still masses to do, and sustained investment is required to meet EU and global standards.
If, as is reported, many environmentalists have become depressed or discouraged, it may be because in some areas they have tried to go way beyond what the market will bear.
Some have a deep hostility to cars. How else explain the prolonged tree protest against the dual-carriageway in the Glen of the Downs? Now the road is complete, the wooded area is attractive as ever, trees being a renewable resource. Indeed, the National Roads Authority is the second biggest planter of trees after Coillte.
There was the ridiculous delay to the N7 bypass at Kildare because of a supposedly threatened species of snail. I am deeply suspicious of an expertise that cannot be verified. Common sense and experience tells us that snails are virtually ineradicable, and the minuscule risk of a marginal change in the biodiversity of this particular species is surely a tolerable one.
We have hundreds of standing mediaeval castles and abbeys. If there are several millions of public money to spend on castles would it not be better spent on preserving some of these than holding up the south-eastern motorway for the sake of the foundations of a castle at Carrickmines, not even listed in Peter Harbison's Guide to the National Monuments of Ireland?
While, preferably, archaeological monuments should be given a wide berth, it is a paradox that road construction and urban developments are the principal source of new archaeological data. The next battleground looming is the M3, and its alleged impact on the Hill of Tara.
The most divisive issue is how far we should allow single rural dwellings.
Some 160 years ago, this island had a population of 8.2 million, most of whom lived in the countryside, along now sparsely inhabited peninsulas that once teemed with life, and in once congested districts now depopulated. Where people once lived, they apparently may live no more.
With the decline of numbers supported by family farming, are we to empty the countryside?
Those with family links to the land (and it is a great way of keeping grown-up families together), even if not employed on it, and others who can contribute to the countryside are to be allowed under the new guidelines to build.
Anyone who reads the Minister for the Environment Martin Cullen's speech to the Seanad this week will find it sensitive, nuanced and hard to fault. It is caricature and misrepresentation to portray guidelines already contained in many revised county development plans as "bungalow blitz" or the suburbanisation of the countryside.
Most Irish people from time immemorial have lived in single-storey dwellings, from huts, to cabins, to cottages, to bungalows. Are taller houses intrinsically superior?
With a modicum of good design, and the planting of trees and flowers, most new houses quickly settle into the landscape. At night, the twinkle of lights in the country is a friendly sight. Far more development is going on in the villages, towns and cities than in the country.
This century, with prosperity and migration, we may well be heading back towards a population of eight million. Some repopulation of the countryside would be a benefit, not a disaster.
How many older buildings would receive planning permission today? The Rock of Cashel, the Vico Terrace in Dalkey, anywhere in Howth?
It is to be hoped that under the guidelines, initially welcomed by all except the Greens, a new more harmonious practice will develop on planning issues.
An Taisce, once a much-respected organisation, is beginning to realise how unpopular it made itself by its indiscriminate opposition to rural housing.
Lobby groups, including environmental watchdogs, if they wish to retain their influence, have to win over the public, not persecute them via a higher authority.
Some environmental campaigns are popular and successful, as Luas will prove to be. Parallel to the motorway building, there has been since the late 1990s substantial Exchequer investment in public transport.
If there is one group with a negative record on that, it is some economists. If their advice had been followed, we would have no DART, no Luas, hardly any mainline railway and a privatised bus service.
Luckily, we live in a democracy. Whether it is trains or once-off rural houses for those brought up in the countryside, what people want, rather than all the time what different experts determine is good for them, still counts for something.