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I first took an interest in Greenpeace back in 1973, before I joined Friends of the Earth, CND and the Green Party (then the Ecology Party) a year later. I’d followed the campaigns against the testing of nuclear weapons in Amchitka (one of the Aleutian islands in Alaska), and then in the French…

When it comes to understanding the true nature of Net Zero by 2050, I have one huge request: could everybody please stop flourishing their particular ‘get out of jail free’ cards – whether that’s a nuclear card, or a hydrogen card, or a 100% renewable electricity (100% RE) card.

In March 2012, four former Directors of Friends of the Earth (myself, Tom Burke, Charles Secrett and Tony Juniper) wrote to Prime Minister David Cameron to warn him that the pro-nuclear bias of his advisors across government posed a significant risk to the Government’s ability to fashion a coherent…

Back in 2016, I sat down in Auckland with a very good friend of mine, Rob Fenwick, to share our frustrations at the difficulty of getting New Zealanders to understand the critical importance of New Zealand’s natural wealth – its soils, forests, biodiversity, rivers, coastlines, oceans and so on. We…

Fifteen months into the pandemic, we’ve all got a rough sense of the human toll in terms of number of cases and deaths – in the UK and the world. It’s not the kind of information we want assaulting our minds, but it’s all but impossible to avoid. We find it so much easier to avoid equally – if not…

I keep thinking what it must be like to be a young climate activist in the UK today. Greta Thunberg, inspirationally, in one ear. Blustering Boris, with all his phoney rhetoric, in the other. Memories of an uplifting ‘coming together’ in Strikes for Climate and other protests in 2019 – more or less…