George Monbiot refers to the young women sentenced last week to two years and 20 months respectively as climate protesters (As the waters rise, a two-year sentence for throwing soup. That’s the farcical reality of British justice, 1 October). Perhaps a term we now need to use, after the disproportionate sentencing witnessed over the last year, is “prisoners of conscience”. I find it shocking that both major parties in the UK think it is acceptable to have prisoners of conscience in our jails.
Rosalind Trantor
Batheaston, Somerset
• Your excellent exposé (Most soft plastic collected for recycling is burned, campaigners say, 1 October) says incinerated plastic is “burned for energy”. While this is a technically accurate term, burning waste “for energy” is worse than coal in terms of emissions. Any energy produced as a byproduct of incineration is dirty energy. The term is a form of greenwash. You should avoid it.
Ann Jones
London
• It was pleasing to read that pine martens have been reintroduced to Dartmoor after a 150-year absence (Report, 1 October), but it’s not truly the case that this reintroduction applies across the whole of south-west England. Around the south-east area of the Lizard, below the Helford river, if you know where to look you will find them – they never left.
Ken Rees
Manaccan, Cornwall
• It seems perfectly appropriate that a comet last seen in the stone age is here again (Report, 1 October). The way we’re going, that is the age we’re heading for.
Neville Goodman
Bristol
• Bob Dylan is one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever, but surely not the greatest (Letters, 1 October). Tom Waits? Leonard Cohen? Clive James thought the latter should have won the Nobel prize and said “Dylan probably feels the same”.
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany
• Dylan was one of the greatest songwriters of the 1960s and the worst singer of all time.
Steve Vanstone
Wolverhampton
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