It was a pleasure to welcome environmental campaigner Richard Lancaster into school this week for our ‘Let Your Life Speak’ series of lectures. Richard is a retired IT professional who works passionately as a volunteer for Greenpeace. Sharing the important message to schools that we can’t all wait for others to act on the environment and that everyone has a role to play. 

His talk started with the fact that during World War One, malaria caused up to 80,000 deaths per month and directly led to the wide adoption of DDT during the second world war.  This reliance on DDT, led to the Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’, which showed the world the damage DDT was doing to our eco-systems. In Richards opinion Rachel was the first Eco-Hero of our time and Richard suggested that she could be seen as the founder of the modern environmental movement.

Richard then went on to mention a few of his personal favourite Eco-heroes including; Dian Fossey for her work with Gorillas, Jane Goodall for her work on Chimpanzees, Jacques Cousteau for his Oceanography exploration and for inventing the aqua lung and Sir David Attenborough for his pioneering nature film work, that bought the world of nature to all of us, through his documentary work and more recently as a campaigner himself. Richard also covered the origins of Greenpeace in the 1970s, 1980’s, 1990’s and more recent examples of peaceful protests.

Our students learnt that several of Greenpeace founders were quakers and that the ethos of Greenpeace is similar to the quaker ethos that prioritises respect for others, nonviolence, equality and the importance of being a changemaker. The more recent eco heroes Richard covered were Greta Thunberg for her work as a Climate campaigner, George Monbiot the environmental journalist for his general campaigning work. Prasiddhi Singh who set up a reforesting NGO in India, while she was still in primary school, Mallayka Ianna Oddenyo for her work against plastic pollution in Kenya and the inspirational work of Sebastião & Lélia Salgado the eco-power couple who planted 2.7 million trees over the span of two decades, on a farm they purchased in the Rio Doce Valley in Brazil.

His talk finished illustrating that we do have solutions to the current crises – we just all need to take urgent action and that everybody has a role to play, he gave global and local examples to show that we can all make a difference. It was a truly inspirational presentation that was well received by both the upper and lower school.