Rebecca Willis

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:You know, what is the driving force of the green movement now? I don’t know. And I, I think it’s now more to do with the way that you push for the change that you need. So I, you know, I am massively respectful of and grateful for campaigners, including people who take direct action and you know any form of campaigning puts issues on the agenda. You know it adds that kind of level of pressure and jeopardy and we really need that. That is one way of operating. You know people who are investing in renewable energy, you know, it’s another way of contributing. People who work on providing the evidence like I do now, I think it’s absolutely incumbent on them to also have the discussion, take sides, you know, make clear what the implications are of that evidence. But that is another, you know, that’s another important contribution. And that’s why I moved into academia, to be able to sort of marshal that evidence and to have that sort of slightly dispassionate approach. But absolutely to do the same thing I have been doing from the start which is to get the environment at the heart of decision making, you know, is Green Alliance’s sort of mantras. So there’s lots and lots of different ways of working within that now. And that is partly thanks to the work of the early campaigners. But I think it’s meaningless to say, oh you know, approach x is valid and approach y is invalid. It’s just, you know, lots of different fronts and approaches.British Library catalogue number: C2037/08 Project clip number: 36