The eco-warrior comes to town

Sun Herald Sunday
17/12/2006 Page: 49

Global warming has brought once marginalised environmental activists in from the cold, and they're heating up the debate, Erin O'Dwyer reports.

LONG before green was cool, a young scientist in suburban Brisbane sold the family car. For years, his family got around on bikes. And bewildered laughter followed them everywhere. Two decades later, Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe is one of Australia's leading experts on environmental sustainability and climate change.

He sat on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and attended watershed conferences in Geneva and Kyoto. It goes without saying that no one is laughing any more. Nor is Lowe holding tight to the hard line anymore. "Doing simple things is far better than doing nothing," he now enthuses. "Green electricity costs about $4 a week so, for the price of a beer, you can reduce your greenhouse gas emissions.

"Once people have done something simple, they are far more likely to do something that requires more difficulty." It seems that the eco-warrior has finally come in from the cold. No longer reviled as hairy-legged hippies living on the fringe, the green brigade is now emerging as the most credible voice in a debate that has become the most pressing on the planet.

It is none too soon. Globally, the hottest 10 years on record have occurred in the past 12 years. Australia's spring was the hottest ever and 93 per cent of NSW is in drought. Bushfires rage in Tasmania and Victoria, while extreme weather patterns are hitting northern hemisphere countries with increasing regularity.

It is a desperate image of a dying planet brought home most graphically by former US vice-president Al Gore's documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth'. And it is to the high-profile presidential wannabe that commentators are attributing the groundswell of environmental support.

Among Gore's supporters is Senator Bob Brown - the granddaddy of Australia's green movement. He also offers up the influential climate change report from respected British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, not to mention the weirding outside our own doors.

"The hotter weather, the drought, the disappearing ski season, coastal erosion and the parlous state of the rivers... people see this happening and they are taking the predictions seriously," Brown says.

"The whole environmental movement has been reviled but now when Greenpeace goes protecting whales or sneaks into Kirribilli and puts solar panels on the Prime Minister's roof, people applaud and the membership goes up". Brown is Australia's original eco-warrior. He helped found the Australian Greens on the back of the Franklin Dam protests in the 1970s. A Launceston doctor-turned-activist, he subsequently joined the Tasmanian Parliament and in 1996 was elected Australia's first Green senator. Other Greens have followed in his lead, and in 2004 the party's primary vote soared from 2.3 per cent to 7.2 per cent.

Brown has been an enduring voice of reason in Canberra but his message is only just starting to cut through. "In late 1996, when I warned of a five-metre sea level rise if the Antarctic ice-cap melted due to climate change, the Government benches broke out laughing," Brown says, from his Hobart office. "Now scientists are openly talking about it. And they are talking about a five- to 17-metre sea-level rise, which means Sydney and Parramatta are very much in line."

For many, it's poetic justice to see a former environmental activist fronting up - in a suit and tie or hosiery and heels - to accept an award, launch an initiative or deliver an important paper. Most compelling is Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai - the colourfully dressed, corn-rowed Kenyan woman whose years of environmental activism brought her into repeated conflict with authorities.

Then there is Peter Singer, the Australian animals rights liberationist known for his staunch opposition to the ingestion of meat and the use of leather, who became a Princeton professor and an international humanist laureate.

Closer to home there is anti-nuclear campaigner Helen Caldicott and former environmental activist Nicola Pain. Ten years ago Caldicott was shouted down at a protest meeting in suburban Sydney. Now her longheld opposition to nuclear energy is informing the current debate. Justice Pain, a former environmental defender recently made headlines with a decision in the Land and Environment Court that stymied plans for a coalmine in the Hunter Valley.

Guru status must of course go to Peter Garrett - the shaved skull rock star who recreated himself first as an environmental activist, then as head of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Now he has planted himself firmly in the mainstream as the Australian Labor Party's new shadow environment minister.

"Clearly [I'm] being apart of the decision making policy and the political process," Garrett says. "But I've never seen it as coming in from the fringes into the mainstream because I've always believed that environment issues in the broad sense were embedded in the community.

The increasing urgency has just meant they have come up in the consciousness and become more visible in the political debate" Interestingly, Garrett's pole vault into the popular has been viewed with most scepticism by those within the green movement. Brickbats have come from Brown and Caldicott - both experts at manipulating the mainstream while not moving from their own line.

Caldicott for one prays daily that Garrett will not buckle. "He's in the perfect position to stop any uranium mines but my reading is that he won't do that, which is a tragedy," she says. There is a risk that he will [sell out] and if he does he has lost his credibility" Anger flickers in Garrett's voice as he dismisses the criticism.

"I don't see it in anyway as selling out," he says. "I see it as a continuation of the work that I've always done. My convictions whether they are about uranium mining or the environment or indigenous issues. .. I feel them as strongly as I ever had and I see them being put into effect, albeit in a different forum." What Garrett, Caldicott and Brown all agree on is that the mainstreaming of green is largely thanks to Gore's film and Stern's report.

"[Environmentalists] have always been totally on board but the body politic was not ready to hear them," Caldicott says. "You can talk about climate change and extinction of species but it's not until an economist says the economy will go to hell in a handbasket that people take note."

But Caldicott warns that activists must always stay true to their beliefs, even while they lap up the prodigal son perks. If not they will lose credibility among a generation of young people eager to join the cause.

"Young people are getting it with a passion that they didn't have before. Underneath they are angry because of what it means for their future" Among the next gen is eco-pin-up girl Tanya Ha, a former model whose practical handbook Greeniology has been selling like organic hotcakes. The 34-year-old science graduate served an apprenticeship with lobby group Planet Ark, before remaking herself as an eco-consultant, TV presenter, author and serious campaigner.

Described as the Nigella Lawson of the greens, Ha says the tag irks her. But she admits she has made the most of her image to communicate with the mainstream. "If you rewind 10 years, my image was used to sell mobile phones and soft drinks and stretch denim jeans. So why can't we use the same marketing principals to promote something worthwhile?" she says.

Catch Ha at home with her two children and you'll find her dressed in recycled clothes, hair scraped back, doing the laundry in an efficient washer and driving a Toyota Prius hybrid. There is no doubt that she's the real deal. She just goes softer on the sell. "We greenies have changed ourselves," she says. "We are all so passionate that we can come across as a bit strong. But if I push it too far I can sense when a person disengages and I've lost them. "The movement has realised that you have to meet them at a place where they are ready to be met."

Millionaire financier Peter Hall is another who lives by that principle. The 45-year-old head of Australia's largest ethical investment fund, Hall wears Prada shoes, Zegna suits and has homes in Sydney and London. He has amassed a personal fortune of $ 70 million, and loves the finest food and wine.

But Hall says he is still a hippie at heart. As part of its ethical charter, Hunter Hall donates 5 per cent of pre-tax profits to charity. And in the past year, Hunter Hall's charitable giving program has given away almost $1 million to organisations such as the Asian Rhino Project, Australian Orangutan Project, Australian Conservation Foundation, Save Australia and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Despite this, Hall admits he has never considered some of the most basic things on the sustainability checklist. He has never calculated his ecological footprint, he does not carbon neutralise and acknowledges his lifestyle is lavish.

"It's pretty hard," he admits. "But I don't spend money on motor cruisers and huge limousines. The net effect of the way I live is on the whole very positive. I try not to have lavish toys and I try to balance my consumption by doing things like donating to green groups." It hardly seems right to criticise a man who gives one-quarter of his income away.

But is being green just the new black? And are there opportunists just jumping on the bandwagon? Sydney businessman Pierce Cody has certainly copped that criticism. The millionaire bought the iconic Bondi Junction organic store Macro Wholefoods three years after selling his lucrative billboard advertising company Cody Outdoor.

There are now eight Macros, and a chain of cafes are on the way. The business is worth $40 million, and Cody has groomed himself as a mung bean-eating, Birkenstock-wearing hippie. But is he just a wolf in sheep's clothing? "When I got involved I was accused of being a Johnny-come-lately," he says. "There was major integrity questioning and there was some element of anger from the existing devotees.

But overtime it changes." Cody, 45, says the business gives him enormous pride and he is gradually creating a greener lifestyle for his family. They eat local and organic, are buying a hybrid car, and have an in-home composter.

"I would say I'm an enlightened corporate, a recently enlightened corporate," Cody says. "I don't like the tag of warrior. .. I'm not trying to force people to make a change, what I'm trying to do is give them a very soft transition." At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

There will always be people who capitalise on a crisis, but the fact that the mainstreaming of green is here to stay is not important, Brown says "The environment has come in from the wilderness; it's mainstream and it's always going to be that way" he says. "It's never ever again going to be a situation where people thought exploiting the environment was endless."