Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1989,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an environmentalist since the 1970s he's been telling us that the world is

threatened by the carelessness of man a message which until recently seemed to fall

on rather deaf ears today however he finds himself at the center of an increasingly popular movement.

The old Etonian who learned to love the world while he was a school teacher in London has become

at 38 one of the leaders of Britain's influential green lobby.

He is the director of Friends of the Earth, Jonathan Poret.

And he does not have a beard, wear sandals or eat lentils, Jonathan.

Are you forever exasperated by the image?

I am a bit. It doesn't happen quite so much as it used to do and I think to be honest most people

now accept that environmentalists are normal human beings who have a range of human attributes

that are not particularly eccentric, and I'm happy to say that those bad old days where it was so

easy to stereotype us as weird and wacky have really passed away.

And you don't even have to live in the country, do you?

No, indeed not.

You don't have to live in the country.

And there are a lot of good urban ecologists.

It's not quite so easy to be a green living in London or a city as it is living in the country,

but it's still important that people do see themselves environmentalists even if they live in cities.

But you don't even have a garden, do you?

...