Doug Parr

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:Doug Parr: In the early stages of when I’d just started out on my three year PhD, that October, the first news of a really thorough investigation into what was going on in the Antarctic ozone layer started to come through and the results were a lot worse than people had expected. This was suddenly front page news, global planetary emergency.Chris Church: It must have been quite odd to have your topic of study suddenly on the front pages of a paper.Doug Parr: Yes, it was. It was weird especially because I mean I think I’d have managed a little bit better with it if I’d been a year in or something. Whereas it was just two weeks in, no, four weeks in but how does one react to that because in no way shape or form could I be described as an expert but it was my area. There it was Red Tops printing pictures of it. Yes, it was a bit disorienting.Chris Church: I mean there’s almost a tension between the traditional academic objective and a much more engaged and subjective.Doug Parr: A tension that plays out to this very day. I mean what is the objective scientist and what is the engaged activist is a constant tension. I was always holding those things in tension. But I mean to be honest, I don’t know if I really felt it was that hard. It was a bit weird having it on the front page of the Red Tops but I always felt I was perfectly able to keep the Friends of the Earth activism and the day to day job of being a scientist on the environment, nonetheless on the environmental beat, I always felt I could keep those separate.British Library catalogue number: C2037/40 Project clip number: 35