ANY doubts that man will eventually destroy Planet Earth must surely have disappeared with the sinking of the tanker Prestige off the Spanish coast and the spillage of 77,000 tons (that's 20 million gallons) of fuel oil.

Pictures of the terrible damage inflicted on marine life and the communities who rely on fishing for their livelihood give some idea of the disaster facing Spain and Portugal.

A massive clean-up operation has been launched by European countries, not just the ones directly affected by the oil spillage. But no matter how determined and costly the damage-limitation exercise is, it will be many years before the 125 miles of beautiful coastline return to anything like normal. There are those in the local communities who believe they will never live to see that day. The stark facts emerging from the sinking make grim reading. The Prestige is 26-years-old, Liberian owned, registered in the Bahamas and run by a secretive Greek shipping dynasty. She was flying a flag of convenience.

She was one of a number of similar vessels, mass produced as quickly and as cheaply as possible in the booming Japanese shipyards in the 1970s. She was a single-hull tanker, and there were many others similarly 'engineered' including Erika, which sank off the coast of Britanny in late 1999, losing 30,000 tons of oil. Another was the Braer, which spilled 85,000 tons off the Shetlands in 1993, and the Aegean Sea, which a decade ago went aground in almost the same Spanish waters as Prestige, losing 74,000 tons of crude oil.

These single hull tankers are not due to go out of service until 2003 at the earliest, at the latest 2007. Others which meet anti-pollution standards can sail on until 2015. So how many more of these ticking time-bombs are going to break up and turn great swathes of the ocean and coast lines into black, slimy graveyards?

The awful truth is that as long as we continue to depend on oil and petrol-powered machines, corners will be cut; profit will be put before safety and, more importantly, before the future of the planet and the climatic changes which are now so clearly in evidence.

I can remember when members of Greenpeace and the Green Party were viewed as alarmist 'anoraks' with nothing better to do with their time and money than mount pointless crusades against business conglomerates whom they considered were using the world's resources for their own, endless mega-profits.

That is no longer the case. Rarely a day passes without disturbing reports of significant changes in climates globally. And disasters on a grand scale, like Chernobyl, and to a lesser degree, the oil tanker spillages, indicate that far from being harmless egg-heads, the Greens have a serious point to make.

They will never be a major political force. The fat cats will see to that. Nothing, absolutely nothing must stand in the way of profit. And if Spanish fishing industry are wiped out, so what? Who needs 'em?