By SIMON COLLINS
High on a north-facing promontory on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, one of Europe's leading ecologists surveys the native trees he planted 18 years ago. Alongside Teddy Goldsmith, 73, is his second wife Kathy, 45, whose family built their Stanmore Bay house long before the surrounding hillsides succumbed to suburban sprawl.
On the lawn, in a flat-topped, wide-brimmed sunhat, their 16-year-old son Zeno plays with a stick. Although he leaves for school in England the next day, Zeno plans to do volunteer conservation work on Tiritiri Matangi for the six months between finishing school mid next year and starting university in Auckland the year after.
The Goldsmith family is seriously wealthy. Teddy's father, Frank, was a British Tory MP. Younger brother Jimmy became Sir James, billionaire financier, and father of Jemima who married cricketing legend Imran Khan in 1996. Jimmy died in 1997. Apart from the house at Stanmore Bay, Teddy and Kathy have two blocks of Northland bush, at Mangawhai Heads and on the Kaipara Harbour, which they bought to save the trees.
They have a home in London and another in the south of France, which houses the Climate Initiatives Fund and was set up with some of Jimmy's money.
A wall of books lines the study at Stanmore Bay. And not just books: Goldsmith has collected decades of journals such as Oceania and the Journal of the Polynesian Society. He estimates he has 15,000 books here and in his other homes.
Goldsmith travels incessantly. For 10 years, he holidayed in Africa and India with a friend, Johnny Aspinall, who bred gorillas and founded a chain of casinos.
Another friend, Auckland lawyer Simon Reeves, describes him as "a connoisseur of wine and good books who reads avidly and has two families. I think he's quite balanced about it."
Yet Teddy Goldsmith also believes that if people carry on living even half as extravagantly as he does, the human species might not survive the next 40 years. He admits it is a contradiction. "I shouldn't be travelling here," he says. "We have to cut down on travel and exports and imports. You have to try to create some sort of self-sufficiency."
His latest book, with American author Jerry Mander, is called The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local. It is an argument he has been developing with increasing desperation since, as founding editor of the British journal the Ecologist, he published a special issue in 1972 called A Blueprint for Survival. Reprinted in 17 languages, it was one of the seminal documents of the modern environmental movement.
F OR Goldsmith, it was a step in a long progression. He was born with pan-European heritage. His father's family were German Jews who migrated to Britain in about 1890. His mother was French, and although the Goldsmith boys were sent to Oxford, their parents lived at that time in France and owned hotels.
"I was at school in Switzerland, France, the Bahamas, Canada. I was a rolling stone that gathered no moss. Even at Oxford, I didn't gather too much moss because I did not accept what I was being taught.
"As far as I'm concerned, what they teach you in the name of economics is a joke. I rejected it all."
Drafted into the Army, he began working out his own view of the world, filling notebooks with his thoughts while serving in Berlin in the early-1950s. From there he moved to Paris, worked in a factory and set up a small business selling hi-fi equipment. It did not prosper, and when his father died and left him some money in 1966, "I gave it all up and started doing what I was interested in".
His travels in Africa with Aspinall gave him an insight into real-life economics. "I realised one thing - that traditional societies worked," he says. "Ours doesn't. I realised that we are annihilating the natural world. What we have done to Africa is beyond belief. We have destroyed its soil, killed its wildlife, pushed the people into the slums, and now we have given them Aids. We can't do much more."
The lessons he drew were not just reformist. Instead, he concluded that economic growth or development itself was wrong, because it was destroying the soils, water, air and climate that future generations will need.
"American agriculture is the worst in the world - unbelievable destruction of the soil," he says. "At least a quarter of the water used for irrigation in America is mined [ancient 'fossil water'], not renewable.
"It's a question of time before it goes. Throughout the world, we are using up our water resources at such a rate, and we have increased our dependence on irrigation. Seventy per cent of the water in the world is used for irrigation."
E VEN in 1970, when Goldsmith started the Ecologist, it was apparent that rising carbon dioxide emissions from cars and industry threatened to destabilise the world's climate. Three decades on, he sees reversing that rise as humanity's most urgent challenge.
He insists the latest projection by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that world temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.4 and 5.8C by 2100 ignores a possible "vicious circle" in which a warmer climate may release more carbon from the land and sea, inducing even faster warming.
"The IPCC is quite honest about this," he writes in the first issue of Pacific Ecologist, a new sister paper of the Ecologist published by the Wellington-based Pacific Institute of Resource Management with a subsidy from Goldsmith.
"It warns of projected climate changes during the 21st century as having 'the potential to lead to future large-scale and possibly irreversible changes in Earth systems'."
Taking this into account, Britain's Hadley Centre has calculated that average temperatures may rise by as much as 8.8C by 2100. Climatologists Jerry Mahlman and Alberto di Fazio foresee a 10 to 14C rise - potentially doubling the world average temperature of 14C.
"I doubt if anyone has worked out under what temperature regime the key life processes on our planet can still occur," Goldsmith writes. "Is it all that certain that they can still occur in the conditions that such changes are likely to bring about?"
To reduce this risk, he says the world must quickly phase out all fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, and switch to renewable energy - an assertion backed by investing in the Christchurch wind energy company, Windflow Technology.
"What's more, if we are to avoid all the possible positive feedbacks from becoming operative, this campaign must have precedence - total precedence - over everything else we do, including the economic activities to which we attach so much importance."
For 30 years, Goldsmith has documented the harm that economic development is doing, and not just to the climate. He co-authored a five-year, three-volume study on The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams. "In India alone, 54 million people have been pushed off their land to accommodate big dams. This is in the name of fighting poverty," he says.
S OON after starting the Ecologist, Goldsmith decided to "practise what we preached" and moved the magazine from London to a small, organic farm in Cornwall. "It was quite difficult. Nobody particularly wanted organic food," he says.
Kathy James, an Auckland student who had been among the first members of the Values Party in 1972, was referred to Goldsmith by Simon Reeves when she went to Britain on her OE. A friend took her to meet him in Cornwall. "He took her round to come and see me, and she stayed. So we linked up," Goldsmith says simply.
They married in Auckland in 1981 and have two children: Benedict, 21, who is in Cornwall and "will probably end up in the arts", and Zeno.
Teddy and Kathy moved back to London in the late-80s. "It was my wife's idea. She thought that since we were so far away when we were in New Zealand, when we got back to Europe we should be in the centre of things," says Goldsmith.
In fact, this month they are in Paris for a meeting about September's "Sustainable Development Summit" in Johannesburg, then in Barcelona to launch a special issue of the Spanish version of the Ecologist.
Despite all this travel, Goldsmith has refused to join the arguably more ecologically sound world of the internet. "I don't have a computer," he says. "There's a lady here in Warkworth who works for me and has a computer with email on it. All the emails go to her. I'm hopeless with machines. It's not ideological, it's due to my sheer clumsiness. I can handle a photocopier and a tape-recorder. I write things in long-hand and dictate them on the machine."
"All my family are involved in environmental issues now," says Goldsmith, explaining his nephew, Jimmy's son Zac Goldsmith, 25, is now the editor of the Ecologist and "becoming a national figure in England". He is Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith's climate adviser.
Teddy's son from his first marriage, Alexander, "just over 40", was also a journalist who became editor of Geographical. "He moved to the countryside, he's got children, I think he thinks he's done enough. He sells books."
A daughter, Clio, 43, married an Italian and starred in 11 Italian films. She is now with Mark Shand, a brother of Prince Charles' partner Camilla Parker Bowles and an adventurer who took an elephant around India and wrote a book about it.
The oldest daughter, Dido, 45, married a falconer and lived for eight years on a mountain in Saudi Arabia, but is now back in Britain.
Another nephew, Benjamin, raises money for renewable energy companies.
Even now, in a small way, Teddy Goldsmith still practises what he preaches, with his two patches of New Zealand bush, an orchard of fruit and olive trees at Stanmore Bay and the native trees he planted below the house. As the trees have grown up to block most of the once-stunning view north to Kawau Island, he has refused to trim them. "I like to see the bush with the sea behind it," he says.
With Simon Reeves and others, he and Kathy have created the Aotearoa NZ Environment Trust to help local environmental projects, and another trust to link conservation volunteers with projects needing helpers.
For all the contradictions of his life, he is making a difference. And anyway, it is his "preaching", not his "practice", that is Teddy Goldsmith's challenge to the world.
* Pacific Ecologist, PO Box 12 125, Wellington, ph (04) 939 4553; Conservation Volunteers: Conservation Volunteers
nzherald.co.nz/environment
Eco-preacher
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