Green Capital 2015: An unlikely ecowarrior

A stand-up comedian goes to the Arctic and comes back a changed man.
 
Not the beginning of a pub joke but the real-life experience of Marcus Brigstocke.  “It was horrendous, monstrous on every level – I was scared for my life on several occasions,” he said.

I believe him. In his trendy suit and designer glasses Brigstocke simply does not strike me as an ecowarrior – I cannot see him roughing it on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

But he did, and was so shocked by what he saw on his first trip to the Arctic in 2007 he went back again in 2008. “I was working with oceanographers and glaciologists and their data was much worse that they had anticipated,” he says earnestly.
 
He came back determined to spread the word but finding a way to convey his experience was tough. “I spent about a year after that first trip really struggling with what to do with this information. I had a misguided feeling that if people weren’t acting it was because I was not shouting loud enough.”

“You can’t pretend the responsibility is all yours and it took me a while to find my way through that but it really frightened me and in some respects that is no bad thing because the message has stuck.

Since then he has tried to drip feed the environmental message through comedy, but when politicians decided it wasn’t a vote winner after all and Dave Cameron swapped his bike for a ministerial Mercedes that tack lost its edge.

“Broadly speaking when it disappears from the political landscape you can’t really talk about it comedically any more because it is not really there for people,” says Brigstocke.

So he has found other ways of spreading the environmental message and, as Green Capital ambassador, he is in Bristol comparing at Green Youth Day: “I have an ongoing commitment to the environment and sustainability and eco stuff – the opportunities come up time to time to engage with people with interesting ideas so I always take those.”

He concedes that there is a huge challenge to convince the next generation to go green in the face of huge marketing and peer pressure: “Young people will have a lot of devices with built-in obsolescence – they are encouraged to bin it, move on get the new one. Whether they will be able to or inclined to resist I don’t really know. I think it will be difficult for them as you don’t want to be the kid who thinks it’s cool to have the older phone.”

It’s a challenge Brigstocke understands all too well: “I shop local I eat a lot less meat than I used to I drive a hybrid car I do fly but I offset my flights but never within the UK. I try to keep an eye on it but I’d be lying if I said that I was in anyway an eco-warrior and you only have to google my name to see that there are whole websites dedicated to what a hypocrite I am.

“I’d say that yes I probably am (a hypocrite), in the sense that the stuff I did early on was very critical of individuals carrying out what I consider to be environment hooliganism.”

He has somewhat mellowed and now believes getting people switched onto sustainability is through their bank balance. “The built sector is something eminently improvable and very achievable. Get someone to show you what your house looks like with a thermal imaging camera. You will be horrified by what you are doing – heat just pours out of windows, doors and ceilings.”

He did just that when he came back from the Arctic spending a small fortune insulating his house “to within an inch of its life, then I got divorced and moved out.” But life is full of such challenges and magnanimously he says he’s pleased that someone else is now benefiting from his efforts. Now he is “slowly, gradually ecoing up my house” – not so much now an eco-warrior but more an eco-realist.