Amanda Root, Essex Girl Environmentalism

At the risk of sounding arrogant, my life’s journey – from Essex Girl to Environmentalist does give hope. If I can go green, then anybody can! I went to a non-academic secondary modern school in Romford, Essex. This is part of East London that spawns awful jokes (if you don’t believe me, find the websites) and the idea women from Essex are either proletarian matriarchs or tarts in white ankle boots (or both). After school, I went to a local college, but a very kind tutor there encouraged me to go to university. Sussex University accepted me, despite mediocre grades. Hey, that was something: it was the 1970s – I was very different after going there. I learned all sorts of things, including the value of being impertinent and reaching high. (Those open doors were basically a legacy of the 1960s, sadly, nowadays such openings for social mobility no longer exist in the UK to the same extent). So, despite, or maybe because of, the cockney accent, I got a further grant and did a PhD. After university, I sent a cheeky letter to the Editor of the New Musical Express, saying I could write better than his mainly male colleagues and struck lucky. He took me on. I had a glitzy period of working as a rock’n’roll journalist. But politics was my real love – so I took a job as a Co-Editor of New Internationalist Magazine in Oxford. That gave me a chance to write about development issues – which was fascinating. One thing led to another, as they say, (including my having two wonderful daughters, Nadine and Alice) and I began to work at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. I mainly researched the growth of geographical mobility and its implications for climate change. Transport is one of the fastest growing end-use energy sectors. This may sound horribly geeky, but transport determines where we can work or study, much of what we can eat, how and with whom we spend our leisure time, what we consume and, of course, our holidays and business trips. It’s pretty important. Having studied transport, I can understand those men in anoraks who get obsessed by train spotting. (You can read my account of 100 years of transport and communications and some of its social and environmental effects in A.H. Halsey’s Twentieth Century British Social Trends, (Macmillan, 2000)).