Green campaigns chief looks to the cold-blooded touch

Friends of the Earth has an influential new recruit. Nicholas Schoon reports

Remember Friends of the Earth? This year, the green pressure group has been almost totally eclipsed in the media's universe by Greenpeace, thanks to its rival's campaigning over the Brent Spar and French nuclear testing.

But the chairperson of Greenpeace International's advisory board, Uta Bellion, has just taken up a new post as Friends of the Earth's London- based campaigner-in-chief. The green world reckons it to be one of the most interesting appointments in years, and a hopeful sign for FoE, which has about 180,000 paying supporters.

Ms Bellion, a German who has lived in Lewes, East Sussex, for eight years, has a tough act to follow. FoE's last campaigns director was Andrew Lees, who died from heart failure in a Madagascar jungle on New Year's Eve while preparing a campaign against strip mining.

Then, to add to the problems, several of its most senior and talented campaigners moved on.

Ms Bellion says she admired Mr Lees's work but will do the job differently, not getting involved in the minutiae of campaigning. "What I would hope to bring in is very cold blooded, strategic thinking about our overall campaigning."

She will play to FoE's claimed strengths - meticulous, good research, close involvement with its 250 local groups and their 10,000 hard-core activists, credible evidence on environmental problems and their solutions to public inquiries, Parliament and the Government.

FoE reckons to perform better on these fronts than Greenpeace. Ms Bellion agrees, although she diplomatically refrains from mentioning Greenpeace's recent admission that it got its estimate for the crude oil content of the Brent Spar hopelessly wrong. "Greenpeace is there to raise hell," she said. "We want to be more on the ground, more solid."

Ms Bellion, 39, was anxious to go back to campaigning after six years acting as "an internal diplomat and engineer" on Greenpeace International's board. An engineer? "Yes, because Greenpeace had grown very quickly, so a lot of strain was being put on the foundations and they began to crack. It took a lot of work figuring out how to fix it."

She has an MSc in civil engineering and, before joining Greenpeace Germany as a salaried campaigner, she did research on processing industrial waste and sewage effluent.

She came to distrust industry, convinced that firms commissioned research largely because it bought them several years in which to continue polluting at unacceptable levels while receiving government grants.

But she was a radical and green long before then. She started to become aware of environmental issues at the age of seven and, in the late 1960s, the 12-year-old Uta von Strunck set up her own local children's group to protest against Third World famine and poverty. Today, she is a deep green whose ideal is for environmental campaigners to work themselves out of a job. "I'd rather see more of my son and my husband," she says. "I'm not so interested in material things, and I think a lot of work is done just to pay for stuff which isn't really necessary, like new cars."

Her husband is Mike Bellion, a mechanical engineer and ex-Greenpeace campaigner, who lives with Uta and their son Danny, and looks after a workshop at their home where he repairs machinery.

She wishes there was an influential, electable green party in Britain, as there is in Germany. One reason she took the job at Friends of the Earth was because its executive director Charles Secrett has decided FoE should campaign for proportional representation in order to give the movement more electoral clout.

Though she admires many British characteristics, Ms Bellion does not admire Britain's government which, she says, has a dismal record on international environmental issues. "They hang on and try to slow things down but, in the end, they always have to give in and change anyway. It's so silly."