I first met Teddy Goldsmith, who died on August 21 and whose obituary appeared on the 26th in the Times, over 30 years ago – in 1977 – when he and I shared a bedroom in Reykjavik during Nicholas Polunin’s ‘Growth Without Ecodisasters’ conference. First met and, I should say, pretty much fell in love with. We got on like a house on fire.
Then a few months later, Elaine, Gaia (who was just a few weeks old) and I drove down to Cornwall in John Roberts’ huge Transit van, painted in TEST’s livery, to see Teddy and his family. Another excuse was that I was doing a piece for New Scientist on the efforts at nearby English China Clays to restore the landscapes ravaged by china clay extraction, a story which took me to the giant pit which is now home to the Eden Project. During the visit, Teddy took me into his library and asked me to join The Ecologist, but I demurred, saying that I was more positively disposed to the role business could potentially play – and, indeed, co-founded Environmental Data Services the following year, becoming founder-Editor of The ENDS Report.
Among other things I remember most vividly about the visit to Teddy’s was the fact that among those also staying at the time were Lawrence D. and Hilda Cherry Hills, who was a longstanding champion of the use of comfrey as liquid manure and up to his neck in the Henry Doubleday Research Institute, plus, of all things, a journalist from Honey magazine. I also recall Gaia becoming very ill because we gave her water from the tap, which Teddy had forgotten to tell us came from a nearby reservoir into which a sheep had recently fallen, drowning and decomposing.
Later, we were digging in a new greenhouse with Teddy’s second wife, Kathy, when he appeared – and perhaps feeling that as a leading light in the back-to-the-land movement he should muck in – picked up a mattock, took a swing, and narrowly missed taking off his foot.
Later still, after he had seemed to welcome the efforts of the Khmer Rouge to end the rule of cities in Cambodia, Teddy asked me to write a riposte in The Ecologist, although all I can remember now about the piece was that I started with something from a sci-fi novel in which an urban civilization was collapsing but everyone was sticking to the rules, driving out on the out lanes – when our hero jumped the central reservation and sped away on the in lanes.
A Blueprint for Survival, the special issue of The Ecologist that appeared in January 1972, had had a huge impact on my in the year I began my M.Phil at UCL, alongside The Limits to Growth, published the same year. As it happens, I should be seeing one of the authors of the Limits study, Jorgen Randers, here in Norway in a day or two, when he and I take part in a sustainability summit.
One of the nicer things in my working life was having Teddy coming to a session I was involved in, perhaps 15 years ago, and say that he had woken up to the relevance of the sort of things we were doing with business – although it was clear that this wasn’t where his heart and inclinations lay. I also remember him pulling open a drawer in 1977 and showing me an early typescript of what would become his book The Way, which I bought but confess I haven’t yet got around to reading.
In retrospect, although we were on different paths at times, Teddy helped me find my own way and continued to serve as a navigational reference point for decades – and I shall always be profoundly grateful to him for that.
