Worth His Salt

The erstwhile hippie activist now an environmental campaigner

By Stef Terblanche

(This article of mine appeared in Leadership Magazine, Edition 294, June 2009)

From the heady maelstrom of leftwing hippie and student activism in Johannesburg, London street protests against nuclear power and apartheid, and Greenpeace campaigns in the Arizona desert, to being a troublesome fly in the nuclear ointment of Eskom...and finally on to a “respectable job” managing the Climate Change Programme at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

That, apart from a relatively shielded childhood in conservative Bloemfontein, a stint in fringe theatre, getting a degree and getting married, basically sums up the life so far of veteran environmental campaigner, Richard Worthington.

To those with even the slightest interest in South Africa’s nuclear power activities, Worthington’s face is a well known one. For a decade or more his was often the lone public face of the ant-nuclear campaigns of Earthlife Africa in Johannesburg, issuing press statements with rapid-fire frequency.

His interest, and the focus of Earthlife, later shifted increasingly to climate change and in May 2008 he made the move to WWF to take charge of its Climate Change Programme.

I first met Worthington back in 2001 for an interview which took place in his “office” – the kitchen of a chaotic red-brick house in Johannesburg’s western suburbs. Off to one side was a small cubicle with computer, copier and dangerously leaning stacks of documents and books everywhere. The nerve centre of many an anti-nuke campaign in those days.

At the time Worthington presented himself for the interview barefoot, with long hair and dressed in jeans and an old, stretched jersey. In between brewing cups of tea and talking passionately against the plans of government and Eskom to develop the pebble-bed modular nuclear reactor (PBMR), he rolled and smoked suspicious-looking cigarettes which, today, he swears were strictly tobacco. The quintessential lefty-hippie activist.

However, the bald-headed, serious-looking Worthington of today is still as passionate as ever about his subject matter when he talks of the position paper WWF has prepared for the next round of UN-sponsored climate change talks for a new international deal to cut carbon emissions and which will succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

That he ended up a left-wing activist is rather ironic, having attended Clifton School in Nottingham Road, KwaZulu-Natal and later St Andrews School in Bloemfontein, the one a private school and the other an “independent” public school with an Anglican character...both conservative schools by Worthington’s admission.

His mother, however, rejected conservative values and taught him and his brother to questions things, putting him on course for a life of activism.

“I did have some exposure to environmental issues though, through the horse stables in the restricted area of the school grounds,” he quips. “My experience was that horse cubes actually make fair eating for a hungry boy… thus learning about product cycles and value chains accorded to diff components of ecosystem service.”

At the University of the Witwatersrand his first real, tentative step towards his future career came with his involvement in political theatre. It was during his 11-year spell of living abroad that he became involved in environmental issues.

Armed with a BA degree from Wits, he spent time in London, joining marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and marches against apartheid, doing “various odd jobs” and working in fringe theatre. The latter he gave up when he found the entertainment industry as a vehicle for encouraging social change did not work for him.

But it was while living in Los Angeles in the US, waiting for his green card, that he started working with Greenpeace as a volunteer.

“I then progressed to canvassing door-to-door for membership and donations, which was a great educational experience at a time when climate change was first taken up as a mainstream campaigning issue, following the Rio Conference,” he recalls.

“We focused strongly on a campaign against a radioactive waste dump hat had been proposed on Native American lands. We went and hung what we believed to be the world’s largest banner on the London Bridge in Arizona – the bridge bought and brought across the Atlantic by a rich man wanting to put Lake Havasu ‘on the map’ as he thought he was getting the Tower Bridge!”

Worthing says he received “some activist training” which included abseiling and handling inflatable boats. At the time he also volunteered with the Rainforest Action Network In 1995 he returned to South Africa.

He joined both Earthlife and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum as a volunteer among other things. With money received from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Worthington and others started an anti-nuclear, pro-renewable energy campaign which later became known as Nuclear Energy Costs the Earth – one of his pet projects.

At the time he also worked in adult education, started working one full day a week for Earthlife and became involved in an air pollution campaign in Johannesburg.

“We never did persuade the City of Johannesburg to introduce vehicle emissions standards and mandatory testing, although the suggestion was always well received,” he says.

Worthington goes along with a description of Earthlife Africa having evolved in 1988 out of a hotbed of student activism at Wits and a base of “lefties, liberals and hippies”.

“From all I have met, I’d say this is accurate. Two key founders are now personal friends; one was a hippie, the other a punk. Peter Lukey is now Chief Director of Climate and Air Quality Management at the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs [Subs: this is new name of department] while the person who was serving as branch co-ordinator when I joined is now my wife.”

From 2001 Worthington was the project coordinator of Earthlife’s Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Project (SECCP). The project aimed, through a combination of awareness-raising, research, advocacy and local and international networking, to mobilise civil society for support of a more sustainable energy development path and responsible climate change policies in South and Southern Africa. It also sought more effective engagement with the new, democratic government.

“When I joined in 1996, policy processes by the new government were taking attention and effort away from single issue campaigns. I started with toxics and nukes and focused most on Nuclear Energy Costs the Earth for some years, then started to focus more on climate change.”

In between he managed to continue his studies and in 2006 received a BSc Honours (cum laude) in Energy Studies from the University of Johannesburg. In 2007 he registered for a Masters degree at UJ but has had to delay this due to work pressures.

Worthington serves or has served in various capacities in the South African Climate Action Network (SACAN), the global Climate Action Network (CAN), and the GreenHouse People’s Environmental Centre among others. In 2002 he was named Energy Personality of the Year by the Sustainable Energy Society of South Africa (SESSA).

With the original SECCP brief having been largely accomplished, it was finally time to move on. At WWF his job entails talking to corporate members and other interested parties with a view to achieving a coalition of demand for effective local, national and international climate change response.

This includes developing information materials and major events and opportunities, to managing a growing team and coordinating SACAN activities and building capacity in Africa to participate in global CAN and international processes. He also participates in policy development processes, national and international NGO networking, some capacity-building and commissioning of research.

On the outlook forward – with the next round of UN climate talks scheduled for June 1-12 in Bonn, Germany as part of a series that is expected to culminate in Copenhagen in December with a new deal to succeed the UN’s Kyoto Protocol – he says a fair, equitable and effective post-2012 climate change agreement will require a just transition to sustainable energy and will also require much greater recognition that economy and ecology are concepts that cannot be separated.

“We cannot sustain economic success without ensuring the viability of ecosystems. The minority can continue to enjoy privilege and unsustainable lifestyles for a limited time. But ultimately everybody needs to participate in reversing the trend from environmental degradation to restoration. The longer we take, the more the majority will suffer.”

The WWF-SA has a position paper it will be submitting. Worthington says that as agreed in the Framework Convention, the industrialised countries – the so-called Annex 1 countries - must take on very ambitious absolute caps, preferably under a second five-year commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (which would require some amendments).

“On aggregate the Annex 1 countries should reduce their emissions by at least 40% against 1990 levels. Fairness or equity requires that in addition to this target for domestic actions, Annex 1 countries must support both mitigation and adaptation actions in developing countries, including mobilising at least $145 billion per annum by 2020. The longer we delay transformation to low-carbon economies, the higher the cost will be,” he says.

“Fairness is of course relative, as the richer countries have already used up about 70% of the carbon-carrying capacity, or ‘atmospheric space’ available within a two-degree threshold. We live in a very unequal world and a new global deal on climate can’t address this as a five year period. It must, inter alia, ensure more democratic governance of international financial institutions.”

“We need a carbon market to mobilise private finance, but the system must be much more robust than to date and ensure that the carbon market does not entrench vested interests,” says the erstwhile hippie activist who today occupies a senior position in what has become a respectable, mainstream occupation in today’s threatened world.