Amy Meek

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Saskia Papadakis: And obviously this is, you know, a project about the environmental movement. What did your, what was your parents’ kind of attitude towards like the natural world or the environment?Amy Meek: I think our parents were always keen, they were always keen to protect it. So they were very much when we were growing people that were sort of the idea of bring along a litter picker and a bag and pick up some litter where you see it. Or leave somewhere cleaner than you found it. They always had that attitude when we were growing up. None of, neither of them have a background in environmental work or knowledge or that being their past experience. It was kind of just, I think an attitude a lot of people have which is a make the world a better place than you found it. And spending so much time outside, I think that was sort of a given with you can’t really enjoy the natural world if it’s been damaged and we’re very grateful that we have so many amazing locations on our doorstep and sadly not everyone cares about leaving them in a good state. So I think we were always brought up with that mentality but it wasn’t really until we were travelling and they sort of learnt with us about some of the issues that the world was facing on like a more global scale that they kind of had a similar realisation of this is way bigger than I think any of us really imagine. Especially imagined back in 2016 when a lot of these issues weren’t getting the same media coverage and awareness that they have now. So I think it was a learning experience for us all. And it was actually when we were travelling and it was back in 2015, early 2016, the UN Sustainable Development Goals which are these seventeen massive world goals put together by world leaders to try and tackle major problems. And they get renewed every fifteen years because sadly they don’t always get reached. And it was back in 2015 that they actually got relaunched as the Sustainable Development Goals. And we were studying them as part of our road school curriculum and as through that, because they’re these massive issues and there’s seventeen of them, she can’t possibly cover them all. And they cover really massive issues like ending poverty or quality education for all, gender equality. We kind of chose ones that were interesting to us as quite young kids and ones that we could see that we could make a difference on. And for us they were ones like life below water, responsible consumption, climate action. And so that became our focus and we were studying them and that was when I think all of our eyes were widened to this idea of we had no idea that this is going on in the background and this is slightly terrifying.British Library catalogue number: C2037/48 Project clip number: 19