The botanist, 77, on meeting Castro, getting older, and becoming a pariah Professor David Bellamy at the Scottish Seabird Centre after unveiling the centre's new remote wildlife viewing camera in North Berwick. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA Arthur Ransome set me on the road to becoming a botanist. By the time I was 14 I'd read all his books and saved up so that I could go to the Lake District to camp and learn to sail. It tipped me towards natural history. I've gone from "the conservationist" to a pariah because of my views on man-made global warming. I still don't believe the current theories. I used to be a rugby player and I like a punch-up. I've been part of a world I never thought I'd enter. I've met Jacques Cousteau, Fidel Castro and Arthur C Clarke. I've spent my winters diving in the Indian Ocean and summers in the high Arctic. I have a large adopted family – half black, half white. It was always my plan to adopt because I went to church every Sunday, three times a day, until I was 16. I'm a patron of gamekeepers. When I was a kid I'd cycle to Brighton from London. I'd stop along the way and there'd always be a good gamekeeper who'd invite me in for tea. They taught me a great deal. I live in Somerset. If I'd lived here 10,000 years ago there'd have been giant elk wandering around in tundra. My mother's birthday was Primrose Day. When I was growing up in the outskirts of London I used to be able to pick a bunch for her on the way home from school. We've lost so much from the countryside. God, I mind getting older. It's horrible. I open old people's homes and once, when I got to one, I was the oldest person there. We've got to stop destroying chunks of the world. In my first year teaching at Durham I took students to Sierra Leone. We found kids dying of malnutrition because we'd chopped down their forests and dug up their diamonds. I've been a campaigner ever since. I've always liked motor cars. I've been a petrolhead all my life. I'm very lucky. I had a loud mouth at the right time, I was a don at an idyllic university and I've got a wonderful family. David Bellamy is patron of Butterfly World in St Albans, Hertfordshire (butterflyworldproject.com)This much I know: David Bellamy
Sunday, 16 May 2010
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