He's saving the Planet

If the world was going to end tomorrow, Sir Crispin Tickell wouldn't panic. What would be the point? He's the sort of person whose needle-sharp mind transcends the need to get angry. He'd study the facts, evaluate the evidence and either conclude that there was hope and single-handedly save the world or, if not, calmly enjoy the final few moments before Judgement Day.

Sir Crispin is arguably the world's foremost authority on climate change and he radiates intelligence. From his home in the impossibly peaceful Gloucestershire countryside he informs, educates and advises governments, scientists and universities throughout the world on the importance of sustainable development.

He wants to save the planet but he is not an environmentalist in the long hair and sandals sense of the word. He gives at least partial credence to fears that civilisation will not survive into the next century. But he is not a doomsday fanatic. What Sir Crispin actually is, profoundly sensible.

"Everything is a system, including yourself. If you hang up a human corpse, 10 per cent of its weight is bacteria that we rely on to survive," he tells me without any hint of ghoulishness. "Cities are just big systems like living organisms too. They suck in materials and emit waste."

The 73-year-old scholar and policy advisor revels in seeing the bigger picture. How nothing exists in isolation and how everything is part of a bigger inter-dependent global eco-system. It is what scientists call 'geophysiology' or 'earth systems science'. And what poets, romantics and hippies call Gaia.

After a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service and United Nations, Sir Crispin spends most of his time driving home the message that unless something changes, that very system is about to break down.

"Climate change is a very formidable threat. The planet is seeing the highest level of carbon emissions for 460,000 years. There have been about 30 urban civilisations since the end of the last ice age and they have all collapsed. The reason for their collapses is always at least partly environmental.

"First you have hunter-gatherers, then farmers who grow more food so the population increases. Gradually the villages turn into towns and you get a division of the labour force and increasing needs for food and materials. The society is constantly on the look out for more resources and eventually it all gets too complicated and suddenly snaps. It is interesting how we are completely dependent on technology. I was in Italy during the big blackouts and it was interesting how people are completely helpless without electricity."

He regularly quotes the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees who, in his latest book, gives mankind only a 50 percent chance of survival beyond the end of this century. The book is called Our Final Century - the publishers decided to leave out the question mark. "I am optimistic of our intelligence and our ability to recognise the threat. I'm just pessimistic about whether humans will do anything about it until the last minute."

Sir Crispin exudes an air of calm, intellectual authority as he glides around the rich interior of his barn-conversion home. He has the same aura of informed superiority as the art critic Brian Sewell. But he does not share the latter's propensity for sneering condescension. In fact, he is welcoming and friendly in a reserved and polite way.

Sir Crispin began his working life in the Foreign Office after studying history and rose rapidly through the ranks. His interest in climate change grew as he became an increasingly senior figure within the government and, later, United Nations.

He talks as if it was de rigeur to have been chef de cabinet to the President of the European Commission, British Ambassador to Mexico, Deputy Under-Secretary of State in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Britain's Permanent Representative on the UN Security Council and advisor to three successive British Prime Ministers.

"I come from a family that has long been interested in science and all my life I've been with people who were interested in zoology so needless to say, conservation was something that came up. When I was 7 or 8 years old I was made a fellow of London Zoo for a year and as a child I went there to play with the chimps. Sometimes I was allowed to take lion cubs home for lunch time," he grins. "But I had to take them back in a taxi during the afternoon. I don't think you'd be allowed to do that today."

Sir Crispin grew up in London where he attended Westminster School. His capacity for academia was in early evidence and he was made King's Scholar. He repeated the feat at Oxford University where he got a first in modern history after being made Hinchliffe and Honours Scholar. After leaving university in 1952 he completed two years of compulsory military service in the Middle East with the Coldstream Guards.

"It was quite a shock at the beginning but I think it was a good thing. You mix with every kind of person and have some rather unlikely experiences. I was sent to Egypt which was so boring I volunteered to go to Jordan and join what was known as the Arab Legion. We used to drive round the desert wearing Arab head-dresses with our Coldstream Guards' badges tucked into the top.

"I didn't see any active service and only had someone try and shoot me once. In Egypt I was driving round in a car when a man drove up alongside us. I saw he was holding a gun and he turned and pointed it at us and I realised he was going to shoot. I told the driver to put the brakes on. We came to a halt and the other car drove past us and the man missed."

His experiences as a soldier served him well when he later led the team in charge of NATO and European security matters as head of the Western Organisations Department for two years in 1972. On his return to England Sir Crispin, or plain Crispin as he was then - He was knighted in 1983 - joined the Foreign Office. He says he decided to apply because competition was fierce which meant there would be no shame in failure. After four years he was sent to Mexico to work at the British Embassy. It served as an apprenticeship for his time as British Ambassador between 1981 and 1983.

"The way of life was obviously quite different but you learn to deal with it. It was very interesting culturally. When I was in the country there were about 50 different languages being spoken and they have the influence of the great Mayan tradition. I remember someone summing up the Mexican situation by saying: 'Poor Mexico. So far from God. And so close to the United States'. Large parts of America were still part of Mexico until 1846. It's a fact that most Mexicans haven't forgotten but most Americans have."

"I didn't have the opportunity to do much about climate change until my sabbatical year in 1975 when I studied world affairs at Harvard University. It's very difficult to be honest about one's motives. I was interested in the scientific dimension of history. The longer term view. I was never particularly keen on the comings and goings of statesmen 100 years ago but more in the big factors."

Sir Crispin became interested in the fate of the many ancient civilisations he studied and the role the environment played in the downfall of once great races like the Incas and Aztecs.

"I read some old CIA papers on how they were trying to use climate change to confound the enemy. As a weapon of war I thought the idea was pretty regrettable but I realised then that climate change can be quite rapid. It can take place in the space of 10 years. People always used to think it would take hundreds of years."

In an extraordinary act of prescience he decided to study climate change and rapidly became an expert in a field that was still in its infancy. Today it is on the agenda of every developed nation. "I did a crash course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I read all the books on the subject in about three months. Now it would take about 300 years. There just wasn't much literature around at the time."

"When I got back from Harvard I felt that people hadn't really grasped the point of climate change." As Chef de Cabinet to Roy Jenkins, the then President of the European Commission, Sir Crispin was able to drill the message home to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. "I had the opportunity of talking to her on board an aeroplane about it and she thought it was quite an important issue. It meant we could put some important issues on the agenda during the G7 summit in London in 1994."

More recently, Sir Crispin has advised Tony Blair on the importance of sustainable development. "Certainly he paid more attention to the importance of it than George Bush seems to have done. The British are rather more like leaders in this area than the Americans, who are still laggers. But Ken Livingstone is the only one doing anything interesting for sustainable development at the moment with his congestion charges, which I'm a big fan of. It means you can walk around London without the risk of instant destruction by a car."

After a spell at the Commonwealth Office, Sir Crispin became Permanent Secretary of the Overseas Development Administration. "One day a certain ambassador from an African country came to call and told me the country was desperate. 'We need money or my government will collapse on Friday' he said. 'We can't pay our army or our police'.

"I explained that we couldn't go around bailing countries out. And sure enough, on Friday, the government couldn't pay its debts and everything turned to chaos. The population quickly went back to its agricultural roots and people tried leaving the cities to go and live in the country. But the countryside was already full of farmers."

Sir Crispin has lived in his Cotswold home on a permanent basis since 1990 with his second wife Penelope. His first marriage to Chloe Gunn dissolved in 1976. The house is overcome with quiet. Stop talking and the sound of the wooden wall-clock is almost deafening. There is an atmosphere of steady, stately libraryhood.

The intellectual fireworks that got him to the top of his field happen behind the scenes, in the unseen recesses of his mind. Outside, the views are beautiful. The brilliantly green grass, gentle streams and rolling countryside could come straight from a scene in the fictitious rural paradise of Hobbitton.

Anyone else would enjoy relaxing in the garden and soaking up the gorgeous views. But Sir Crispin is too busy exploring uncharted intellectual territory. "It's extraordinarily hard to detach yourself from work. Every time you learn something you get a new perspective on things and realise that it's all so interesting. I remember giving a talk in China and a guy came up to me and asked: 'How is it, when you are so old, you do so many things? Curiosity is as good an answer as I can come up with."