A new Natural Environment White Paper was launched today.

I still can’t quite believe that the government thinks it can ‘mainstream’ sustainable development across government, as it has said it will do, without a sustainable development strategy. And that’s even leaving aside the question of whether it can be properly transparent and accountable to the public about its approach to ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development without a strategy.

And so my first look at the Natural Environment White Paper (which covers England only) was a simple word-search experiment.

I searched, across the 80-odd pages, for phrases including the words ‘sustainable’ or …