I am standing in a bijou cafe in Soho, central London, trying to spot an
activist. It’s not easy — certainly not as easy as the days when you could
smell them a mile off. My eyes flit about, trying to alight on a telltale
sign: Thai-dye banana, hessian skirt, a scowl.
Then I see her. Tamsin Omond — a 25-year-old Cambridge graduate and
granddaughter of a baron — has a shock of blonde frizzy hair and a
preternaturally cheery disposition. Yes, she’s scruffy, but not in that
eco-nutter way. More in an off-duty model way.
In fact, the most unusual thing about her is the smile plastered across her
face, then the friendly hug. You’d never guess she has been arrested half a
dozen times for (among other adventures) scaling the Houses of Parliament to
protest against the government’s inability to keep think-clouds of carbon
dioxide from pluming into the air.
When did the shouty mob of eco-protesters become so presentable? “Did you
think I’d bite you?” laughs Omond. The daughter of a City banker, she
thought she might become a priest but in her final year at university
chanced upon an article about global warming on a friend’s coffee table. “I
thought the world needs more climate-change activists than priests right
now, but don’t worry, I understand the fear,” she says.
She has been working to dispel it, having become a fixture on the green
lecture circuit and with her new book Rush! The Making of a Climate
Activist. “I know the green brand is unwashed, unshaven and up a tree,” she
sighs. “That doesn’t represent me. I can have an opinion about fashion and
want to devote my life to this. Why does one have to be separate from the
other?”
Apparently, it doesn’t. In the past year or so, the mainstream has changed the
green fringe beyond recognition. Now the only prerequisites for saving the
planet are common sense and, on occasion, a decent pair of high heels. Take
Rebecca Frayn, 47, a novelist and film-maker who on paper is less a green
goddess than a bête noire. Her life is eye-poppingly flashy. Her husband is
the Oscar-nominated TV executive Andy Harries (he produced The Queen) and
her father is the playwright Michael Frayn. She lives in a double-fronted
house overlooking Chiswick Park in west London packed with gorgeous consumer
durables.
Yet when she came across some climate-change literature in 2007, she was moved
to arms. “I was devastated reading the statistics,” she recalls, “so I
emailed them to my book group to discuss. Before I knew it, we’d set up an
organisation called We Can (Climate Action Now) to do whatever we could
through the media to help.” They have since recruited Jerry Hall, been
active on the protest scene, and been photographed for Vogue.
Why was the reaction so instant? “Well, a few months before we started working
with Plane Stupid [the umbrella organisation for groups who campaign against
aviation expansion], they got onto the roof at parliament and dropped their
banner. That got the message out to people like me. As soon as Plane Stupid
heard about what we wanted to do, they approached us. They could see the
value of a demographic that was friendly to the Daily Mail.” What
demographic is that? “Middle-aged and middle class,” she says, laughing
drily. She has since found herself in the unlikely position of rushing the
Houses of Parliament with her yummy-mummy pals and leaving notes for her
husband that begin: “Now, darling, if I get arrested today…”
It seems so unlikely. Frayn is soft of tone and extremely delicate-looking.
Plus, doesn’t she find activism a tad cringy after a lifetime spent as a
quietly glamorous member of the middle classes? “Yes!” she cries. “But the
issue itself is so all-consuming you have to do something. And you get
better. I have redefined myself in a way.”
Joss Garman, 24, has been volunteering at Greenpeace since he was 14 and
became a full-time staff member when he graduated from the School of
Oriental and African studies two years ago. A cradle campaigner, his parents
were always hot on green issues, and he spent his school holidays breaking
into nuclear-weapons sites. He has been arrested over 20 times. “The first
time my parents were a bit freaked out but really supportive. Now they’ve
got blasé. They’re like, ‘You know when you get arrested and it’s in the
middle of the night? Can you make sure the police don’t phone us till the
morning.’ ”
Though the press were quick to dub Garman “the New Swampy”, in a north London
cafe near his office, with his sandy fringe and latte, he looks more like a
banker than a tree-hugger. He shrugs: “We were meant to be the radicals, but
on climate change we’re calling for a lot of the same things as Nasa, the
Royal Society, even the Pentagon.” He points out that mass protests over the
Iraq war and shelved plans for another runway at Heathrow woke up “normal”
people to the power of activism. “Heathrow reminded an entire generation
that people-power works.”
For others, the answer has been to go local. Rebecca Hosking, 37, was working
as a camerawoman for the BBC’s natural history unit when, on assignment to a
remote Hawaiian island, she came across a beach littered with dying birds,
their stomachs having literally exploded with the litter they’d ingested.
Millions of discarded toothbrushes, tampon applicators and plastic bags had
swept on the tides and decimated the wildlife. Back home in Modbury, Devon,
she wondered what could be done. The main problem was the bags, so within
weeks she convinced all 43 Modbury traders to ditch plastic in favour of
reusable ones.
How did you do it, I ask her while she takes a break from training a sheepdog
at a family farm. “You can call it arrogance, you can call it hope, but I
couldn’t have done it in another town. You have to be a local.” And tough.
You convinced the local Co-op to drop their bags? “I told them, ‘I can see
two stories coming out of this. One: all the family-run local traders have
ditched plastic bags and the one national company hasn’t. Or two: we all
have. Which do you want?’ ”
Hosking confesses she used to be the most careless of urbanites when she was
living in London, chugging Evian and living off ready meals that were
packaged to within an inch of their lives. “Now I’m farming, all that
disposable living seems like a distant memory. Last year, when Climate Rush
organised a protest picnic at Heathrow, I offered my house so everyone could
come and make protest blankets. I thought it would be 10 rather well-spoken
young women. Instead, 50 or 60 young eco-warriors flooded in, covered in
amazing tattoos, wearing what seemed to be cobwebs. It led me to a meltdown.
I saw my lifestyle through their eyes.”
Luckily, most of the prejudice the new greens get doesn’t come from
toffee-nosed capitalists or fellow converts but from old-school campaigners.
Omond, being beautiful and prone to crop up on telly, has come in for
particularly frosty reviews from her unwashed brethren.
“A lot of the activists at places like Climate Camp [an annual gathering of
green campaigners] want to stay fringe. If they’re not being attacked by
police or the media, they can’t understand what their point is.” They should
grow up and embrace the future, she reckons. “Surely this is more important
than what I look like?”
Fair point, though I’d warrant it doesn’t hurt.
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