Earth first - if that's OK with you

Bunny McDiarmid feels her job is a privilege. Picture / Richard Robinson

You don't so much interview Bunny McDiarmid as have a consultation about the interview. Asked whether she thinks she's good at something, or what she's like as a boss, she'll say she doesn't know and perhaps she could ask somebody else. Or, what do I think?

This method comes as no great surprise. She may be the new executive director of Greenpeace, which may be a multinational organisation, but it is still a Greenie one. So when she does answer the question about what sort of boss she is, she says: "I think I'm consultative."

Also, that: "I don't mind making decisions when I know half the people won't like it."

She can be tough.

"Yeah, you can't be friends with everybody. No, that wasn't one of my goals in this job."

All of which is what you'd expect most executive directors to say. But most would be unlikely to say: "There is a sense of family, which is going to sound a bit naff to some people, but it's true. [There is] this tension between being professional and being a family and it lies somewhere in the middle."

Funny sort of family, with its staff and members ranging from "scientists to hippies to 17-year-old volunteers to 97-year-old volunteers to people who have come from corporates".

There are the complainers, although McDiarmid would never put it that way.

"You'll get different people who say we're going too much towards being too professional, and other people will say: 'Oh no, we're too flaky on this end and we need to be more professional."'

You could ask where she sits; you already know the answer: "Somewhere in the middle, really. I think being professional's just a word for doing things well."

Spoken like a true executive director.

Before going to see McDiarmid I looked at some old photos of her and she looked exactly as you'd expect a Greenie activist to look.

Now she's a big boss in a big organisation that was described last year by a former long-term staffer as having become a "suit-and-tie lobbyist at international forums".

She says she doesn't really have a power suit, but when she meets Government bods and important sorts "I definitely look tidy".

Today she's wearing a top that, yes, could be called tidy, a faintly floaty skirt and those strappy leather sandals we used to call slave sandals when they were all the rage at high school.

She's not wearing any makeup and has one of those healthy, glowing faces that look as though they've never encountered so much as a smudge of slap.

When I ask if she's a hippy, she says: "Oh, I think at some stage of my life you could have called me that. It depends what you mean by hippy."

What do I mean by hippy, she wants to know. There she goes being consultative again, but I reckon I can out-consult her any day. So I say: "What do we mean by hippy now?"

I reckoned wrong because she comes back with: "It's a term that's used for fashion these days. I don't know - do I look like one?"

By which point my mouth is clamped firmly shut to avoid saying: "Yes." But my face must have given it away because she laughs and says: "Oh, I'm just being fashionable."

Usually she wears jandals to work in the summer but I'm not about to ask whether she's put good sandals on for the interview. She's sportingly suffered through enough frivolity.

McDiarmid is not a frivolous person, although she says you need a sense of humour to do her job. And you have to be an optimist.

"You could let what you know make you feel quite hopeless."

Well, yes, you can see that. We've been talking about the whaling and she says Greenpeace has been trying to stop it for almost 30 years.

She says she can get defensive about the organisation and she does, just a bit, when I say that, actually, the disputed footage of the big Japanese boat ramming the little Greenpeace boat is not unhelpful: it's a handy metaphor for the battle.

I suggest that the organisation is able to use such images in the PR campaign and she says: "Yeah, but boats ramming each other in the Southern Ocean is not a good thing to do."

I use the words "dangerous stunts" and that doesn't make her too happy.

"What they're trying to do is not a stunt. I mean, people are bearing witness. They are trying to prevent whales from being slaughtered."

I ask her if she thinks she's good at PR and she says: "What do you think? Umm, PR? I think I'm pretty good at that."

Many people have come and gone from Greenpeace over nearly 30 years, and McDiarmid has, too, but now here she is in what passes for the executive director's office with the tapa cloth on the walls.

You might think it would get a bit tiring working at saving the planet and the whales and the oceans for all that time, but she regards this as an idiotic question.

I can tell when she regards a question as daft because she repeats it back, trying not to sound incredulous. Mostly she succeeds in this because she is well-trained in talking to the media, and secondly, she is nice.

I suppose you could be a horrible person and want to save whales but it probably wouldn't be a good look for either the whales or the organisation.

You probably couldn't be horrible and be called Bunny, either. Still, the name is incongruous for a Greenie.

"It was a nickname my dad gave me when I was a baby and it just stuck."

She lives on Waiheke in what I call a commune and she calls "an ecological community, actually".

She doesn't like commune "because for some people it means, 'Oh, that's where everybody owns everything together and they all take their clothes off and they all run around' and I don't know what."

Whereas in her community they co-own the land but own their houses individually and have a building committee and "it's commonsense stuff - a bit like Greenpeace, really".

Which means, presumably, you must be nice to everyone all the time.

"Nooo. I mean, I think I'm generally nice ... but no, you don't have to go around pretending that you love everyone."

Which sounds pretty much like what she does at work. She likes the fact that there is little difference.

"I like working for Greenpeace. I feel like it's a privilege to be doing something that you like doing. You don't have to be somebody different in your job from who you are at home in terms of what you believe."

She's long been sure of those beliefs. What she is best at, I think, is communicating that surety.

But after the interview, while she's being photographed alongside the Greenpeace dove, she says that she's now not sure she is very good at PR. And again: What do I think?

Oh, I think she probably is - but I'll have to get back to her after a bit more consultation.