Changing The World

Veteran campaigner Pete Wilkinson has been challenging authority on environmental issues for more than four decades. David Green visits him at his Peasenhall home and finds time has done little to cool his passion for protecting the planet.

SUFFOLK may be a world away from Antarctica but Pete Wilkinson loves it just as much. As a Greenpeace campaigner he led six expeditions to a frozen continent of desolate beauty, expeditions which were ultimately pivotal in preventing oil and gas exploitation of one of the Earth’s last pristine wilderness areas. Antarctica is now a World Heritage Park and there is a moratorium on commercial activity until at least the year 2041.

But Suffolk holds a different kind of attraction for him – one of an undulating ‘green’ landscape and its wildlife.

“I have always been drawn to the county for some reason. If I believed in reincarnation I would say I lived here in a former life,” he says.

Pete has been a thorn in the side of authority for decades. Gone are the days when he led environmental campaigns of direct action, over issues such as the deep sea dumping of radioactive waste, the annual culling of thousands of young seals in the Arctic Circle and the fur trade, as well as trying to prevent mining for oil and gas in Antarctica. Now, as an independent environment consultant, he is still a man who asks awkward questions and expects answers from agencies that sometimes struggle to live up to their own claims of openness and transparency, claims which often perish on the altars of national security and commercial confidentiality.

Apart from helping to oppose the building of a Sizewell C nuclear power station, Pete and a group of like-minded colleagues are trying to raise money for an exploratory trip to the north-east Atlantic to study an area where plastic waste is accumulating and attempt to find a way to remove it from the world’s oceans.