When researching eco-friendly consumer markets, it’s tough trying to find a balance between the opinions and ideas of enthusiasts, sceptics and the rest of us. The BBC News site has started to aggregate its consumer and industry environmental news into a section called the Green Room.

The articles are agreeably balanced and even tend towards a healthy cynicism about received wisdoms and new fashions for environmentally conscious initiatives. Every feature article this week questions the directions that green advocacy groups are taking and implicitly calls for a consensus approach to the problems they cover. My attention was drawn particularly to Martha Schwartz’s article on urban planning and the tendency to focus on single buildings instead of whole cities.