The last Charity of the Month was inspired by Persepolis, a cracking film about a girl growing up under a fundamentalist regime in Tehran. This month I’ve seen The Exorcist, Inception, Local Hero and Sullivan’s Travels. Naturally I’m on the lookout for a charity supporting crucifix-shagging children trapped in a dream within a dream in a small Scottish town on the outskirts of 1940s Hollywood. Unfortunately there are dozens to choose from and the task of narrowing them down has become so arduous I’ve turned my attention to the BP thing and gone for Greenpeace instead.

Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig that beat Garry Kasparov, incriminated Nixon and sucked off the 1970s has leaked somewhere between 94-184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf. It’s an environmental disaster of epic proportions, the kind of thing Dick Cheney might think about to get his bonk on.

I’m not donating to the clean up because that’s BP’s responsibility but it put me in mind of a certain charity that raises awareness of environmental outrages large and small, day in, day out, a charity that has campaigned for decades to protect Mother Earth, a charity that warns us of our folly and guides us to better things. The Charity of the Month this month is Greenpeace.

Remind me to take out the mention of Greenpeace in the first paragraph or it’ll render that tension building pointless.

Greenpeace has been knocking about since the early 1970s, publicly frowning about whaling, seal hunts, toxic waste, acid rain and CFCs. That most of those issues now sound as dated as an angora space hopper is down to them and others banging on until we did something about them. My donation could help maintain their hippy boat of annoyance, The Rainbow Warrior, or fund their campaigns against illegal logging, over-fishing, dumping of nuclear waste, toxic chemicals and such and such. You can donate here.

All of which brings us to the closing paragraph where usually I’d throw in a punchy gag or a sarky kicker or a bit of smut but given no one is remotely interested in this deeply unpopular recurring feature I’ll go and eat worms while you and the rest of the world go do something better with your time. Nuts to the lot of you.

Photo credit: Greenpeace