Little guys change the world

Leonard Greene, an environmental writer based in America's Midwest, bemoans the fact that, traditionally, it's the small firms that innovate while the corporate giants plough on with tired ideas.

Watching the Big Three American automakers thrash about in nets seemingly of their own making these days conjures an image of a mastodon, one of those seven-ton elephant-like monarchs of Ice Age forests, being brought down by a bunch of diminutive spear-waving Neanderthals. The great beasts died out 11,000 years ago – not, however, from over-hunting; what finished off the mastodons was . . .