Thank you for the enlightening post.
You forgot the Islamophilia, though; a problem he seems to share with much of the British upper class.
I liked his book on architecture, but I thought he went totally around the bend with his environmentalism.
No, I didn’t forget the Islamophilia - I just don’t think it is anywhere near as extreme as some people seem to think. The Prince of Wales treats Islam with respect - as the future Head of a Commonwealth that contains half a billion Moslems, I don’t think that’s inappropriate. If he didn’t treat it with respect - that’s enough to trigger major problems.
It’s also important to realise that the Prince takes the idea of separating terrorists who profess a religious belief from others who express that belief, very seriously. The man he was closest to, outside of his own family, his mentor through his adolescence and young adulthood was brutally murdered by terrorists who claimed Catholicism as a justification for their wicked acts. He separates the faith of decent people from the faith of evil people. He’s actually very hard line on dealing with terrorists of any stripe and any professed beliefs - as somebody who has spent his life as a target of extremists.
His environmentalism is something I don’t agree with, and I have told him so - but I do know that he has spent a lot more time studying these issues and is much better informed on them than I am. He’s not just pulling it out of nowhere. But it’s also an unfortunate fact that as a future King, it is constitutionally difficult for him to speak against the policy of Her Majesty’s Government on any issue as it could become his government at any time. During the Blair/Brown years, about the only major issue that he agreed with the government on was environmentalism - and so he wound up making a lot of speeches about that as a constitutionally safe topic. And even the current government is nowhere near as conservative as he is, on most issues, so he’s still stuck with environmentalism as one of the few safe issues.