F, a 54-year-old religious ecologist, was born in Wales to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother. She joined the Church of England at the age of seven and became a Methodist in her mid-teens, and then a Quaker after that. She went on to study psychology and philosophy at Edinburgh University and in the 1980s became the UK director of the International Ecological Society, a body that deals with ecological problems. This post-industrialist life led her to walk about in the countryside, run from place to place, but as a rule, she was not around the beach. Once, walking through the beach at Padstow, Cornwall, she had a bad experience, discovering that a lot of the shoreline was irrecoverable salt-puddles that leaked badly and were neither safe nor pleasant to touch. It was a wake-up call, and if needed, Ecologist to the People proffered her methods and what became Ecologist to the People offers a positive vision of nature in order to repair our “fragile and violent world”.
So I do in some ways thing that I’m a human being first.
This was not, she says, a desire of her background to be ordained in the Christian church, but is rather her habit from the beginning.