The memorial column on Ham Hill in Somerset is etched firmly in my memory. I could see if from my bedroom window in the house where I grew up.  From boarding school, where I went from the age of eight – and from London when I left home at 18 – I would frequently return and spend time running up and down the quarry hills of this iron-age fort that dominates the surrounding countryside.

Soon after school I spent a year in Paris – not ‘down and out’ but earning money from busking, selling flowers and even one job which involved dressing up in silver foil to sell frying pans and another marking ‘pooper scooper’ gloves for Parisian poodles!  When I returned to London my career was no less eclectic.  I sold teddy bears in Selfridges, shirts and jumpers door to door, and spent a few months working as an industrial pudding cook at Metal Box factory.  The ex-navy head chef had a very strong accent that I could never understand – he called me ‘Miss What What What Cordon Bleu’…

It was my time travelling in South and Central America that really got me hooked on environmental issues.  I was horrified to see rainforests being chopped down, vast slum areas spreading as rural populations moved to the cities and, on a more personal level, my fellow crew members on a luxury racing yacht chucking all the boat garbage into the sea – plastics too!  I put a stop to that.

I came back from Central America via the East and West coast of the States.

I first started working with John Elkington, at an organisation called Earthlife, which imploded shortly after I joined – but I hasten to add, not because of me!  The brilliant thing about it was that its demise spawned a number of other organisations including SustainAbility Ltd, which I co-founded with John.

Having learned to roller skate down broadway in the rush hour, I continued from my home in North Kensington, to John’s house in Barnes.  I remember the back room fondly, as that’s where my environmental career started. 

John Elkington and I joined forces in 1986, setting up a company called SustainAbility and subsequently writing The Green Consumer Guide, which went on to sell over one million copies worldwide.

Published in the Autumn of 1988, the book shot to the top of the best-seller list and stayed in the top ten UK non-fiction titles for about a year.  Overseas editions were published in over 20 countries including Canada, Australia, USA and many European and Scandinavian countries.

The success of The Green Consumer Guide led us to write other books in the same vein. A year later, in 1989, our Green Consumer’s Supermarket Shopping Guide, was published. It was very exciting to discover that in less than a year, most of the supermarkets moved from complete ignorance on environmental issues to being much better informed, as they’d appointed environmental managers. Our 99 page questionnaire, was used as a bible on what they could or should be doing.

Next was the Young Green Consumer Guide, published along side our Greenest School Competition, which encouraged school children to carry out an environmental audit of their school. The book was widely published overseas.

We should have called it ‘The Green Holiday Guide’, because people were confused by the title of our next book ‘Holidays that Don’t Cost the Earth’.  Also co-authored with John Elkington, this book set out to challenge the tourism industry.  We wanted to show people how to enjoy their holiday, without adding to the worst effects of tourism – sewage pollution in the Mediterranean, alpine damage on the ski slopes and litter mountains in the Himalayas.

The first book I co-authored with John Elkington was Green Pages – The Business of Saving the World. Tom Burke, was the third author.  The book was republished in its original form in 2017.

The Green Business Guide, published in 1991, was written with John Elkington and Peter Knight. It challenged businesses of all sizes to develop environmental policies for every aspect of their activities, and gave practical guidance on how to do so.

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GREEN CONsumer week

Green Shopping Day

Greenest School Competition

the Kitchen that Cooks without Roasting the Planet

The Holiday Extravaganza

The LCA Sourcebook

Who Needs It

Consultancy

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• P&G
• SHELL
• Brisith Airways
• The LCA Sourcebook
• ICI PU
• Novo Nordisk
•  

When I returned to live in Somerset in 1995, I moved to the National Trust house at Tintinhull, which is also in the shadow of Ham Hill, but on the other side to my childhood home.  Two of my three sons were born in one of the upstairs bedrooms during our 10 years renting the house.

The gardens at Tintinhull house were made famous by Penelope Hobhouse, who lived there before us. When we were there it was open to the public in the Summer months but they only came through the central part of the house into the garden. Luckily we didn’t mind people peering in the windows wondering what we were up to. 

Our tenancy at Tintinhull came to an end in 2004 and so did our marriage. I moved with our three young sons to Coker Hill, just the other side of Ham Hill. 

Eco-renovations at Coker…

WORKING FROM HOME.

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Manual 2000

New Foods Guide

P&G

BBC Food

SSDC

Western Daily Press

Jupiter Global Green

Ecos Trust – Somerset Trust for Sustainable Development

CPRE local committee

2004 Moving to Coker – Ecorenovation

New Green Consumer Guide 

Speeches

THE NEW GREEN CONSUMER GUIDE.

MOVE TO HOOKE 2012.

LARGE SCALE ECO RENOVATION

PLASTICS PLIGHT