One of the more surprising themes of David Bellamy's autobiography Jolly Green Giant is his obvious disenchantment with certain strands of the environmental movement, writes Arminta Wallace
David Bellamy is in the bush. Not that that's anything new - the bearded botanist has been springing out of various bits and pieces of assorted greenery since he first started making television programmes in 1970. But in the discreetly tousled courtyard garden of The Commons restaurant on St Stephen's Green, where he has just handed out the ESB/CVI Community Environment Awards 2002, you might expect to find a somewhat more decorous Bellamy. Instead, egged on by our photographer - "can you look a bit madder? Yes, that's it" - the president of Conservation Volunteers Ireland is busy immersing himself in a huge wall of ivy and pretending to fall backwards into it.
CVI is just one of 43 non-governmental organisations of which the 69-year-old Bellamy is either president, vice-president, chairman or patron. They range from the Bat Conservation Trust through the National Council of Master Thatchers Associations to the Chongololo Club in Zambia. "I'm beginning to think," he declares, as he brushes stray bits of foliage from his not inconsiderable person, "that sitting on planes is not the best thing to do. But I'll be around the world four more times this year, just to work with new projects. I go round patting people on the back, that's all - I don't do anything, because they've done it. I just sound jolly." He sounds, in fact, exactly like he does on the telly - only unscripted. He doesn't so much answer questions as stride around topics which interest him in a roller-coaster, stream-of-consciousness, full-frontal attack.
A sample paragraph runs as follows. "Now a big report has come out saying that all the farmers who stuck to the old things actually make more money - well, we've proved that over the Irish Sea already. The unfortunate thing is, WW - how much money have they spent? And they still haven't saved the tiger. They haven't saved the panda." This is the World Wildlife Fund, presumably. "I'm not knocking them, but, you know . . . see, they have forgotten that WW was set up to do one thing, and that was farm the big game of Africa using big game hunting. Because they knew that if the big game wasn't important to the local people and they could make money at it, it would all be replaced by moo cows. And yet for Greenpeace, with that £64 million Rainbow Warrior, to go down to Johannesburg campaigning against atomic power - well, that was just cheap publicity. I helped with family planning clinics in Africa, and actual childbearing is starting to go down all over the place - and that's nothing to do with Aids. It's women.
"Once they've got the franchise, you know? And that's an amazing thing. Amazing. But population wasn't allowed to be mentioned at Rio Plus 10 - it wasn't on the agenda. Nor was biodiversity."
The trick is to wait for him to take a breath, then lob another topic across the table. Ecologically, are we doing anything right? "Yes. Down at community level, we are. But you can't get it in the media. I could make a totally new television programme every day about good news.
"I see a lot more of the work of the devil these days. I do. And I'm still waiting for the church to stand up for itself." Not known for a feisty stand on ecology, the Christian churches. "No - or even on Creation, or evolution," comes the unusually succinct reply.
Bellamy's real beef with the spiritual powers-that-be is to do with their lack of practicality. He is outraged by the news that the Baptist Church in the States - he was born into a Baptist family, but deserted to the Church of England - is planning to build its own theme park right next to Disney World.
"Because they were so appalled when it was opened up to the gay community one weekend," he says. "And they'll do it, too, because they can afford it. But, look . . . I'm just starting a big project in Ghana. We've got about 1,500 villages there where everyone's got river blindness. And we can cure that easily. It doesn't cost pennies. Go into the Aids clinics, and you'll see a 26-year-old girl who was raped and given Aids dying with fungi coming out of her mouth - she can't even drink water. So why aren't the churches supplying painkillers? If everyone went to church on Sunday and gave the price of a packet of painkillers, at least those people would have dignity for the last few days of their lives."
Having made his living out of the telly, Bellamy is well aware that it's the box in the living-room rather than the confession box which wields the real temporal power these days. "We used to worry about 1984 and Big Brother looking out of the television. Now we've got to be clued into Murdoch. He tells my grandson what to wear; how to behave; and when he comes to having sex, how to have sex. That worries me."
Ah, yes - grandchildren. A chance to discuss his newly-published autobiography, Jolly Green Giant, perhaps, and its revelations about his secret desire to be a ballet dancer, his family of adopted children of varying ethnic origins, and his organic vineyard in Italy?
"I thought it would be very boring writing the book, but it was quite good fun. My wife's on chapter eight. She's never read anything I've written before, but she's on chapter eight and she says it's quite interesting."
Is this the same wife with whom, on honeymoon in 1959, he first visited Ireland? "Well, I fell madly in love with this young lady across a biological laboratory, you know, and it took me about a year and a half to get anywhere near her, and I'm still desperately in love. Aren't I lucky? 'Coz, you know, my brother is on his fourth or fifth wife - and we're very similar, he and I. But he just wasn't lucky." One of the more surprising themes of Jolly Green Giant is Bellamy's obvious disenchantment with certain strands of the environmental movement.
He reserves particular scorn for those he describes as "NIMBYs" (Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ers) and "ecosmoothies".
Does this mean that, at 70, he's getting tired of the fight? He chortles. "You should see what the lawyers took out of the book, he says. "No, when I sat down to write, I thought, 'I really am fed up with the bloody green movement - all the people I've given my time and my money to, and they haven't come up with anything'. And then I thought, 'Silly old bugger; you really are just a bit too old. You've had a wonderful life and the green movement is working, and who is making it work? All those people who've come in there and done something'. And they're gonna win, you know, but it'll be a long, uphill struggle."
For some time one of these very people has been sitting at the table with us, pen poised on A4 pad. The young man from the River Licky Management Plan Project in Rusheen, Co Waterford, overall winner of the community environment award, is far too polite to interrupt, but is anxious to ask the president of CVI some extremely serious questions about mussels. The merest nod of encouragement in his direction, and they're off, he and Bellamy, diving into the murky depths where Margaritifera margaritifera is to be found: the shy, retiring Pearl Mussel, extinct in Europe, apart from parts of Scotland, the west of Ireland, and the River Licky. Bellamy says he'll do what he can, but on being invited to visit the project, warns that he has owned a peat bog in the west of Ireland for 17 years and has never seen it.
"Get the fishermen on your side," he advises. "They know the river, they need clean water, but they always tend to sit back in the development argument. And if the anti-foxhunting people get their way there'll be no more fishing anyway." He turns back to The Irish Times. "They want to do away with all hunting, shooting and fishing, everywhere. And what would be the point of the countryside then? Might as well concrete it over and grow the damn thing in polytunnels."