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Eco Hero: Joanna Yarrow

Anna Guyer | 18.06.10

If green is the new black, surely Joanna Yarrow is one of the reasons why. She makes "green" glamourous, from her fashionable wardrobe made by ethical designers and sourced on eBay, to her home which showcases how smart interior design can co-exist with a low eco footprint. Joanna is the quintessential example of the elegant environmentalist.

Her ethic came to her organically, handed down to her by her parents who worked in environmental arenas and were committed to living a self-sufficient and eco-friendly lifestyle. She went through school feeling somewhat different: her healthy and organic meals were in sharp contrast to her friends' crisps and snacks, and she made do mending her clothes when all her friends were into throw-away fashion. But she survived and, in fact, thrived from those experiences which became the foundation of everything she's about today.

Joanna went on to study sustainability with Forum for the Future, and now runs an inspiring and trailblazing consultancy, Beyond Green. She has an impressive list of broadcast credits which include her role as GMTV's environmental expert, and she is a published author whose work includes 1001 Ways You Can Save the Earth, How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint, and Eco-Logical!

Not one to rest on her eco laurels, Joanna has recently left London to take over Wilderness Wood, an award-winning working woodland which hosts more than 30,000 visitors a year, inspiring and educating the local community and school children about sustainable living.

Green, glamorous, astute, committed and challenging: Joanna Yarrow is this edition's Greenhouse Eco Hero. Writer Anna Shepard gets her take on the issues. -- ed.

How would you describe yourself?
My official title is writer, broadcaster and consultant. I set up a sustainability consultancy called Beyond Green and also property company Blue Living. I’d also like to add injured runner, recent ruralist and constant juggler.

What is your mission?
To make sustainable living attractive and accessible to a broad range of people.

What do you care most passionately about?
I want sustainable living to speak for itself. In other words, I want people to feel as passionately about it as I do - not just because its green or eco or good for your carbon footprint, but because it tastes good, makes you feel good, saves money and makes you fit and healthy.

Is organic important?
Whether in farming or any other kind of horticulture, organic production methods make a lot of sense. It’s about respecting the systems we rely on. I’m not a farmer, but rather alarmingly, since I took on my parents’ wood in Sussex and moved there with my family, I am a recent forester (www.wildernesswood.co.uk). I’d love to manage the wood completely organically, but the soil is poor quality, which is why the land is still woodland, otherwise it would have cultivated long ago.

To grow Christmas trees - our main crop – we’ve had to use petrochemical based fertilizers and chemical weed killers. One of the things I want to do is cut back on that by introducing sheep to graze around the Christmas trees. The idea is that the sheep will do the weeding. There’s a certain breed that don't eat Christmas tree shoots, or that’s what I’m hoping.

What do you think is the next big challenge?
One of them is to create some inspiring success stories. In the UK, people are starting to get very clued up about problems, but there are still so few examples of good solutions. Most people don’t even have a picture in their mind of what ‘doing things differently’ might look like, whether it is a house or a low-carbon community. It’s really difficult to find sources of inspiration that will appeal to a broad range of people, not just natural-born treehuggers. That’s one of the things we’re aiming to achieve at Wilderness Wood. We want to get lots of people coming here from different walks of life to get a taste of sustainable living.

What would you like to achieve in your lifetime?
What’s important to me is to be involved with projects that inspire people to live in a different way - it could be a book or TV program or a place like the wood that reaches out to people and makes that emotional connection. I grew up lucky enough to have a personal relationship with the natural world. Obviously not everyone can grow up in a 60 acre wood, but there are lots of different ways that you can touch people and inspire them to make changes.

What top green principles do you live by?
One of the big ones is travel. In my twenties, to my shame, I clocked up a pretty nasty carbon footprint. These days, I don’t fly - except if it’s unavoidable for work. All our holidays are by train. Last year we went to Morocco: we took the train to the south coast of Spain, then the boat over to Tangier, then we explored Fez, Marrakesh and up into the Atlas Mountains.

I don’t own a car or a driving license. Everyone keeps telling me that I won’t survive in the countryside without one, but so far, three months in, I’m doing fine. In terms of food, I'm vegetarian and I have ambitious plans for growing my own. In London, we grew herbs and salads in the garden, but here in Sussex, I’m hoping to do a lot more.

On the energy front, we use a green energy supplier. All our heating and hot water comes from wood, and I’m hoping in the future to install solar hot water heating and PV (photo-voltaic) cells for electricity.

I’m also a massive fan of ethical fashion – I like the Ascension boutique in central London and also Equa in North London. For everything else, I pretty much live on eBay.

What one thing do you wish everyone did?
Try to holiday overland. I’m hoping that the silver-lining to the volcano ash drama will be that people will realize they can get to places easily and in an enjoyable way without flying.

How long have we got to save the planet?
The planet is going to be fine. It’s a silly idea that we’re saving the planet; it’ll sort it itself out, it just won’t be very comfortable for humans. I say that having written a book called 1001 Ways to Save the Planet (Duncan Baird)- which I’d like to mention, wasn’t my title. But in terms of making the planet habitable, we have a ridiculously short window of opportunity to act. I worry that we’ll look back in twenty years time and realize how much easier it was now.

Who is your Eco Hero?
Al Gore - his film was a turning point which made it ok to talk about all this stuff. He managed to get green issues on so many people’s agendas.