Tim Flannery kills the engine on his small white boat and lets it nudge up to a stony outcrop on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, on the northern fringes of Sydney. As the hull grinds softly against the bottom, the 53-year-old writer, explorer and climate campaigner clambers nimbly out to survey the scene.
We have crossed this wide, khaki-hued stretch of water so Flannery can have his photograph taken. Sandstone boulders line each bank. Above them rise eucalyptus-clad cliffs. Flannery poses good-humouredly, noting the beauty of a nearby, smooth-barked apple tree. “This is one of the reasons I came back to Sydney,” he says, referring to his world travels and a spell in the US. “It’s as close as you’ll get to pristine, and I find it incredibly beautiful.”
In recent years, Flannery has become a household name in Australia and a familiar figure internationally. Following the publication of his acclaimed 2005 bestseller The Weather Makers: Our Changing Climate and What it Means for Life on Earth, he joined the likes of Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes as one of the country’s most prominent public intellectuals – and the likes of Rachel Carson and Al Gore as one of the environment’s most important author-advocates. Now published in more than 30 countries, The Weather Makers sounds an eloquent warning call about the reality of climate change and its repercussions.
Flannery has a knack for making complex science seem immediate and comprehensible, and the book is lucid, compelling and unflinching in its fears for the future. “Some time this century the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural forces,” he writes. “Then, the insurance industry and the courts will no longer be able to talk of Acts of God, because even the most unreasonable of us could have foreseen the consequences. Instead, the judiciary will be faced with apportioning guilt and responsibility for human actions resulting from the new climate.”
Two years after The Weather Makers was published, Flannery was named Australian of the Year – at a time when John Howard, a climate change sceptic, was prime minister. Since then, he has spent much of his time in the public eye trying to persuade his fellow citizens of the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He is now being asked to lecture internationally, too; on a trip to Washington in 2006, for example, he briefed advisers to a junior senator called Barack Obama (“I’d never heard of a senator Obama back then, or I sure would have asked to meet him,” he laughs now). Between trips, he’s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Greg Bourne, the former regional president of BP Australia and New Zealand, who now heads WWF Australia, says: “I think the role that Tim plays now is as the translator. He has that ability to communicate extremely well to adults, to teens, to mum and dad. Few scientists actually have that skill.”
As Flannery’s communication skills have become famous, so have his quirks. He is unwilling to talk about his private life to the media, and he makes it clear that his home is off-limits. And yet when we meet for lunch ahead of the photo shoot, at a café overlooking the Hawkesbury, his daughter, Emma, joins us. Twelve kilometres up river from where we sit is the house Flannery shares with his second wife, anthropologist Alexandra Szalay. All the building’s power comes from solar panels, all the water from rain. It sounds idyllic: “We regularly see swamp wallabies and a lyrebird sings pretty much every day.”
. . .
Flannery spent his childhood in the prosperous, bay-side Melbourne suburb of Sandringham. His parents – an accountant and a housewife – named their first child after St Timothy, a Christian martyr stoned to death for opposing pagan ceremonies, and had him educated in the Catholic tradition at St Bede’s College. Neither church nor sport seems to have held much appeal, and Flannery later described his high-school years as “time serving”. But he loved the beach. When he was nine, he found a rock with an unusual marking on it on the cliffs of Port Phillip Bay, near his home, and took it to the National Museum of Victoria. There, a curator told him it was the fossil of a sea urchin. From that moment, the museum joined the shore as a place where Flannery could escape the tedium of the suburbs. Even in childhood, he was apparently depressed by the effect of the inexorable march of urban sprawl on nature. He once told a journalist that he remembered complaining about it to his mother; “That’s progress,” she replied.
After school, Flannery enrolled in an arts degree at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, where he met his first wife, Paula Kendall, who went on to become a school teacher. It was a career Flannery was also leaning towards until he met palaeontologist Tom Rich, while delivering specimens to the museum. Rich saw that Flannery’s knowledge of natural history was remarkable.
“I didn’t have the same flypaper mind that just picks up on things and hangs on to them,” Rich told The Australian newspaper. “He was already there at 18 ... whenever I needed an answer on something I would just ask him. People say I was his mentor, but I’m not sure who was whose mentor.”
Thanks to the intervention of Rich’s wife, Flannery was admitted to Melbourne’s Monash University for a degree in earth sciences. By all accounts, he was a sharp student, and one who didn’t mind the occasional youthful adventure. In an essay included in his recent book An Explorer’s Notebook, Flannery tells of a motorbike road trip he and a mate made in 1975, when he was 19. “My friend Bill and I left Melbourne with a few dollars in our pockets, intent on circumnavigating the continent at the height of summer.” Along the way, they planned to collect “specimens of comparative anatomy” by boiling the flesh off the skulls of dead kangaroos. After terrifying fellow travellers by dragging a disembowelled kangaroo around, and risking injury or death in a locust swarm, they made it back to Melbourne, awakened to the realities of the Australian landscape and its Aboriginal occupants.
At the age of 26, after moving to Sydney and landing a job in the mammalogy department of the Australian Museum, Flannery made his first overseas trip – to Papua New Guinea. The mountainous island sprawls “like a vast prehistoric bird across the sea” and his immediate response was a mix of excitement and fear, a combination that kept him coming back for more, 15 times in all. He also took field trips to the Solomon Islands and elsewhere. Photos of Flannery from that time invariably show him grinning in some tropical jungle, often bare-chested, his beard darker than now, curly hair more abundant. In many ways, it was a boy’s-own-adventure life. During his explorations, he identified more than 30 new species of mammals. Sir David Attenborough described him as being “in the league of the all-time great explorers”. Indeed, he discovered more new species than Charles Darwin.
Back in Sydney, Flannery – who earned his PhD from the University of New South Wales – was producing a substantial body of scientific work in palaeontology and mammalogy, co-authoring more than 100 scientific papers and several academic books on mammals. But he was already operating outside the confines of the scientific world; his way with words landed him regular radio and newspaper interviews. In 1994, he went a step further, publishing the book that would become his first bestseller, an ecological history of the impact of humans on Australasian ecosystems called The Future Eaters. A review in Time magazine raved: “Like the present-day incarnation of some early-19th century explorer-scholar, Tim Flannery refuses to be fenced in.” The book’s basic message was that the custodians of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea must learn to adapt to the remarkable ecologies of those places – by limiting population growth, managing the environment and eating native species rather than imported ones. It was an uncomfortable message, especially in a country that still took many of its social cues from Europe, and some scientific experts questioned the factual basis of a number of Flannery’s suggestions, such as the idea that rainforest species could be planted on the fringes of cities to protect them from bushfires.
“When he published The Future Eaters, I had no idea who Flannery was,” says Bourne, of WWF Australia. “But it was a very interesting book. He had the courage to come out and speak about his theories and put them out in public when you could be pretty sure others were going to criticise them.”
That same year, personal disaster struck. The house Flannery and Kendall owned south of Sydney was destroyed in a bushfire; the couple separated two years later. And a year after that, in 1997, Flannery’s professional life also took a turn: his time as an adventuring scientist came to an end when he accepted an invitation to teach at Harvard for a year. “You know, the mountains do start getting steeper and you realise you’re not 20 any more,” he explains.
On his return to Australia, Flannery moved to Adelaide as head of the South Australian Museum – an appointment that would have a huge impact. To prepare for the part of the job that involved advising the government, he started reading more widely in scientific journals. He discovered, to his surprise, that climate change was a much bigger issue than he had assumed. “I became more and more shocked as I went along,” he remembers. “I lived in a very strange world for a while, where I knew that there were very serious things happening that were being caused by everyday actions, and yet everyone around me had not the slightest idea that this was a problem. It was very odd.”
. . .
That sense of shock prompted him to start writing The Weather Makers, a five-year process that would transform him from a media-friendly scientist to a full-time talker, telling the world about climate change. The book arrived at an opportune moment, when growing anxiety about global warming provided Flannery with a ready audience. Within months of The Weather Makers’ publication, Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was released, and suddenly climate change was one of the foremost issues of public concern.
I ask Flannery what he thinks drove this shift in public perception. He has obviously been asked this question before, and has a ready answer. “There’s a few trends working together,” he says. “If you go back to the 1960s and 1970s, people just weren’t ready to hear this stuff. We lived in a different world. It was a tribal world; we were still recovering from the second world war and there was this belief that technology could save us from anything.”
By the 1990s, he argues, this view was waning and people were starting to worry about sustainability. “I personally think that one of the most important events was the Iraq war. The failure of the war, and the failure of the Bush regime to deal with that issue and be honest about it, opened the door for people to be sceptical on a whole series of things, one of which was climate change. So when Gore came along, people were ready to listen. My own view is that it was the right approach at the right time, and Gore made a huge difference. People like myself, with a perhaps more in-depth view, may have influenced specific people, but for the mass movement, I think it was really Gore.”
Whatever the underlying forces that led to this global shift in awareness, it was real, and Flannery quickly found himself in a position of prominence that outstripped anything that his previous writing or public appearances had prepared him for. His visibility gave him a bully pulpit from which to shout his messages – but also left him open to attack by those who saw him as a scaremonger. Vocal critics have included journalists in Australia’s Murdoch-owned papers, including one who listed Flannery in his round-up of “Top Ten Dud Predictions for 2008”, for warning that Australia’s cities could die of thirst; not long afterwards, Australia had made an unpredictable switch from dry El Niño conditions, to the wetter La Niña, and received a welcome drenching.
Flannery was also criticised by some of his peers for speaking out on scientific issues that did not fall within his academic speciality – a common charge against those who become vocal about climate change. Gore’s greatest weakness as an environmental advocate is, perhaps, the fact that his opponents can easily portray him as a zealot rather than a knowledgeable specialist. Although Flannery was (and remains) a reputable scientist, he has suffered a similar fate. “I was sort of worried [about that] initially, but then I realised that there are no trained climate scientists,” he says. “We all come from somewhere else. Until very recently you couldn’t do a degree at any university in the world that was called ‘a climate science degree’. We’re all either atmospheric physicists, or meteorologists, or palaeontologists, or glaciologists. That’s just part of the business of being in the climate area.”
On other occasions, Flannery has attracted ire for discussing possibilities that some consider too radical or unsound. In late 2007, for example, his suggestion that some Japanese whaling in the southern oceans was sustainable got under the skin of activist groups such as Greenpeace. Others attack him for supporting nuclear power.
Any scientist who steps out of academia into the public realm risks getting caught between academic credibility and political pragmatism. Flannery is no exception, and friends see these attacks as an inevitable consequence of his personality. “Tim is fiercely independent, highly provocative and yet sometimes not terribly strategic,” says his friend Nick Rowley, a former environmental adviser to Tony Blair who now runs a consultancy in Sydney. “By being that, you will create followers who will walk through fire for everything Tim Flannery says and people who say he’s got this wrong, he’s got that wrong and he doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. But although some of the criticism may be valid in one sense, that doesn’t mean the contribution Tim makes is a negative one. In my view, it has been challenging yet enormously positive.”
Flannery acknowledges that some of the attacks on him in the media have left him feeling “bashed around”, but he seems to accept it as inevitable. “I’ve always attracted a lot of negative publicity,” he says. “One of the things I do, I think, is challenge the status quo – whether it be climate change, or interpreting Australia’s past. And the status quo is there for a good reason: a lot of people benefit from it, and in challenging it, you inevitably make enemies.” He pauses for a moment before hitting on the analogy he’s after. “Life’s a bit like a game of rugby. You grab the ball and you’ve got to run through the scrum and make as long a run as you can ... and not get distracted by people kicking you in the nuts. You’ve got to keep running.”
In recent times, that persistence has made some political headway. In late 2007, a general election in Australia saw Howard’s government replaced by Kevin Rudd’s Labor party. One of their first moves was to ratify the Kyoto protocol that seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
But Flannery still found himself working hard to convince climate-change sceptics. It was a task he continued through public talks, media appearances and publications such as his 2008 essay “Now or Never”, which makes another plea for sustainability. Meanwhile, he has commitments at Sydney’s Macquarie University, whose faculty he joined in 2007, and he recently filmed two television series with his old friend John Doyle, an Australian comedian. The programmes helped cement Flannery’s reputation as the man you’d want explaining science to you at the pub. In them, the two men traverse the country’s troubled Murray-Darling river system, and the verdant “Top End” of Australia’s northernmost territory, chatting to locals and delivering an unthreatening environmental message. His onscreen persona throughout is that of diffident, Akubra-hat-wearing sidekick to the more outgoing Doyle.
. . .
A few days after our riverside lunch, Flannery has traded his sustainable house and boat for hotel rooms and international travel. In late January, he joined celebrities such as director Baz Luhrmann and tennis great Rod Laver in Los Angeles and New York for Australia’s annual showcase event, G’Day USA. On January 21, he e-mails briefly: “Just watched Obama’s inauguration. Amazing ... ” By early February, he has turned up on the subcontinent, where The Times of India quotes him urging the government to focus on importing Australian uranium rather than coal.
Flannery told me that he considers communication an obligation for him and other publicly funded scientists. “I find it difficult to understand scientists who are quite happy to take the money and spend more or less their whole life in purdah and never report back to the people who employ them.” And yet, after four years – since the publication of The Weather Makers – of taking his message directly to the public, his focus is now on persuading businesses and governments of the need for change. Two years ago, Erik Rasmussen, the founder of the Scandinavian think-tank, Monday Morning, heard Flannery talk at a conference in Copenhagen and approached him; soon afterwards, the two men set up the Copenhagen Climate Council, a group of 30 business and scientific leaders. Rasmussen got the Danish government involved (Denmark is due to host the next major international climate change negotiations in December this year) and Flannery brought in business leaders such as Richard Branson.
On the council’s website, Flannery sets out a business-friendly message: “With every revolution, from wood to coal, from coal to oil and now from oil to the renewables, profits have increased. That’s just the way the world is. I would like to see business people rewarded for doing the right thing.”
Flannery says his interest in engaging with the business community dates back to his days at the South Australian Museum, where he realised energy companies were not “demons that needed to be defeated and slain”. “Quite frankly, part of the problem I’ve seen with the environmental movement is that it has existed up to now in an ‘us and them’ world,” he says. “I just think that is utterly the wrong model.”
In fact, The Weather Makers was partly funded by Robert Purves, a business mogul who is a board member and past president of WWF Australia. In 2005, Flannery defended Purves’s idea that the environmental movement and business should work together more closely. “It was a breath of fresh air when Rob came along,” he said. “He is extremely intelligent, obviously well-connected and used to getting things done, which is not what a lot of scientists or environmental groups are very good at. I’m not interested in ideology.”
Apart from anything else, Flannery feels that talking one-to-one with a chief executive gives him greater leverage than delivering media-friendly sound bites. “There’s only so much you can achieve through using the media. Quite often there’s no way you can develop an effective argument of the right [level of] intellectual integrity,” he says. Does he worry about being co-opted by money and power? “I suppose there’s always a risk of that,” he says. “But I try to keep a strong vision of what I do and operate within that framework.”
Back at the café in Sydney, Flannery had said his decision to focus on a business audience reflected a growing awareness that he needs to be more selective in the way he engages with the world. “I think I now understand a little bit better how to actually do something about the problem. It’s not the scattergun approach of dealing with every sceptic that turns up in the local papers or magazines – you waste your time chasing your tail doing that. If you can get business acceptance for the need for change, then you’ve really done something.”
Stephen Pincock is a science writer, based in Sydney. His latest book, ‘The Intelligence Equation’, will be published in late 2009.
