E3G

BBC Radio 4: Launch of E3G

By Chris Littlecott

To mark the unofficial launch of E3G as an organisation, Chief Executive John Ashton appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme to discuss our role in promoting environmental change.

You can listen to the archive recording of John’s interview on the Today programme website – scroll down the page to 8.42 am and click the link.

The transcript of the interview follows here below.

John Humphrys: Are you one of those good citizens who recycles everything, turns off the lights, uses the car as little as possible, all in the cause of protecting the environment?

Well, that’s fine, but there’s a new organisation born today that says that environmental change can really be brought about only by insiders – those who work in the government and in industry. It’s called E3G, Third Generation Environmentalists [sic], and its being run by John Ashton, who was the Foreign Office’s head of Environment Policy. Good Morning.

John Ashton: Good Morning John.

JH: Now, presumably ‘third generation’ because we have had the job being done very effectively, some people might say, by organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Soil Association, environmentalist groups.

JA: That’s right. I think the first generation goes back actually to the 19th century and before that - the roots of the conservation movement. The second generation started in the 60s and 70s and gave us the organisations that we are familiar with today. They have been hugely successful in setting an agenda, nobody can escape the agenda, but they have been less successful at delivering the solutions. So, we are not proposing an alternative to that. We want to build on the foundations that they have laid. We think that what they do is still extremely important but we want to mobilise people on the inside of institutions, in governments, business, civil society, science, even the media and see whether we can join people up to deliver solutions more effectively.