Supporter of the Week: Amyan Macfadyen

Hannah Booth

16 December 2011

To celebrate Friends of the Earth's 40th anniversary, I've been talking to some of the supporters who've made it all possible. Amyan Macfadyen (right) was in it from the beginning.

"I moved to Northern Ireland in the 1960s, where I was a professor at the University of Ulster in Coleraine. My subject was originally zoology, but I got more and more oriented towards ecology.

"I was a Friends of the Earth campaigner from the very early days. We were never a big group in Coleraine, but we were very active.

There were too many projects to recall, but we did spend a lot of time campaigning to save peat bogs.

"I raised four children in Northern Ireland, and retired in 1986. I moved back to England in 2006, to Sheffield, where my daughter lives. I'm an amateur gardener and help once a week in the Botanical Gardens.

I'd love to do more but I'm not terribly active these days. But I'll never lose my interest in plants."

Next week: Kendra Ullyart. To see all the supporters I interviewed, visit our 40th anniversary gallery.

Hannah Booth also writes Lives Less Ordinary.

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