Charles Secrett

Charles Secrett is a British environmental campaigner and writer. He served as Executive Director of Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) from 1993 to 2003.

He has held advisory roles related to environmental policy, including advising the Mayor of London. He is also a co-author of the 2008 report A Green New Deal.

Early life and education

Charles Secrett was born in February 1954. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1972 to 1977 on a John Motley Morehead Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and American Liteature

Career

Early environmental work (1985–1992)

In 1985, Secrett participated in the launch of Friends of the Earth's international rainforest campaign, which investigated the economic, social and political causes of tropical deforestation. He conducted field research in Brazil, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Malaysia, Indonesia and Nigeria, where he focused on logging, mining, and land use practices. His book, Rainforest: Protecting the Planet's Richest Resource, was published in 1985.

Friends of the Earth (1993–2003)

Anti-fracking and Friends of the Earth activists gather outside the Scottish Parliament in October 2017 to protest ahead of a vote to ban fracking in Scotland.

In 1993, Secrett became the Executive Director of the Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland. He opposed nuclear power, instead promoting renewable energy alternatives, and called for stricter environmental regulations. He was a member of the UK Government's roundtable on sustainable development for ten years, a group which later became the Sustainable Development Commission.

During Secrett's tenure, Friends of the Earth campaigned on genetically modified food, industrial agriculture, air pollution and nuclear reprocessing. In 1999, following the publication of research on genetically modified food safety in The Lancet, Secrett called on the UK Government to halt GM crop trials, suggesting that there was "no scientific consensus about the safety of GM food".

In 2001, Friends of the Earth raised concerns about dioxin emissions from foot-and-mouth disease pyres. They also criticised the government over earlier European Union warnings relating to intensive farming practices. Later that year, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace lost a High Court challenge concerning the MOX reprocessing plant at Sellafield.

McLibel trial (1994–1997)

The cover of the leaflet at the center of the McLibel case.

Secrett appeared as a defence witness in the McLibel trial (McDonald's Corporation v Steel and Morris), which ran from June 1994 to December 1996. Secrett appeared in April 1996, arguing that McDonald's could not conclusively prove that beef used in its US restaurants had never originated from cattle reared on deforested tropical land in Central or South America. This was because the USDA grading system at the time recorded meat by quality rather than country of origin. Secrett said that McDonald's public denials on this point "cannot be shown to be true" for the period up to at least the end of 1986.

Active Citizens Transform (2004–2006)

In 2004, Secrett co-founded Active Citizens Transform (ACT) with Ron Bailey. It was a non-partisan campaign promoting sustainability and electoral reform. One of ACT's projects was Local Works, the campaign for the 2007 Sustainable Communities Act. ACT merged with Charter 88 in 2006, which subsequently merged into Unlock Democracy in 2007.

Advisory and consultancy roles (2004–present)

After leaving Friends of the Earth, Secrett moved into advisory roles in sustainability, climate policy and renewable energy. He co-founded the Robertsbridge Group, a business sustainability consultancy, which has worked with companies such as Interserve and Unilever.

Between 2004 and 2008, he was an adviser on climate, environment and sustainability to Ken Livingstone at the Mayor of London's office, focusing on London's climate change policies. He was on the board of the London Development Agency, and chaired its health and sustainability advisory group.

From 2004 to 2012, Secrett chaired Triodos Bank's renewable energy investment fund, Triodos Renewables (later renamed Thrive Renewables). He also sat on the external review committee of Shell, advising on sustainability and climate change issues.

Secrett was an advisor to Base Cities between 2008 and 2014, advising on sustainable urban development projects. Between 2007 and 2012, he was a senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

In 2018 and 2019, he was a policy adviser on sustainable economics to Clive Lewis, assisting in the report Fiscal+ Accelerators on the Road to Zero, which proposed reforms to UK climate and resource taxation policy.

Between 2019 and 2021, Secrett was an adviser to Zero Hour (formerly the CEE Bill Alliance) which campaigned for the Climate and Nature Bill in the UK Parliament. He also held voluntary roles with The Ecologist, Environmental Law Foundation, London Wildlife Trust and Renewable World.

Selected publications and commentary

Green New Deal activists at a demonstration organised by the Sunrise Movement at the Ohio Statehouse, Columbus (March 2021).

In 2008, Secrett was one of nine co-authors of A Green New Deal, published by the New Economics Foundation, which proposed a combined policy response to the financial crisis, climate change and peak oil. Other contributors included Ann Pettifor, Caroline Lucas, Tony Juniper, Andrew Simms and Larry Elliott.

In a 2011 article for The Guardian, Secrett suggested that Britain's environmental movement had become strategically ineffective and called for reforms to campaigning tactics. He said that existing forms of protest were "not sufficient to alter the destructive path travelled by virtually all governments and most corporations". The article prompted responses from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

Prior to the 2015 UK general election, Secrett endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.

In 2016, he wrote an essay for the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development on citizen-led approaches to environmental justice and sustainable development. In 2024, in The Guardian, he asked UK political parties to commit to increased climate policies ahead of the 2024 UK general election.

In April 2026, an article posted by The Guardian about the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist group within the UK, stated that Secrett has criticised the definition of Palestine Action and its supporters as "terrorists".

Recognition

Secrett appeared in the annual Channel 4 / Observer 'Power 300' list of "the most influential people in Britain" between 1999 and 2001, with a rank of 36 in 1999. He was the subject of a photographic portrait by Nicola Kurtz, taken in January 2003, held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.

Publications

• Cash or Crisis: The Imminent Failure of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1982), with Chris Rose.
• Proposals for a Natural Heritage Bill (2nd ed., 1984), Friends of the Earth. ISBN 0-905966-34-1.
• Rainforest: Protecting the Planet's Richest Resource (1985), Friends of the Earth.
• Timber: An Investigation of the UK Tropical Timber Industry (1985), with François Nectoux, Friends of the Earth. ISBN 0-905966-39-2.
• Motorway Madness: Roads and Their Impact on the Natural Environment (1986), with Victoria Cliff Hodges, Friends of the Earth. ISBN 0-905966-43-0.
• Contributor to Green Pages: The Business of Saving the World (1988), edited by John Elkington, Tom Burke and Julia Hailes. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415007665.
• Government's Environmental Record, 1979–89 (2nd ed., 1989), with Mick Hamer and Jonathon Porritt, Friends of the Earth. ISBN 0-905966-81-3.
• How Green Is Britain (1990). Radius. ISBN 0-09-174598-5.
• Contributor to Pressure Group Politics in Modern Britain (1998), with William Waldegrave, Peter Bazalgette, Adam Gaines and others. Social Market Foundation. ISBN 1-874097-26-7.
• "Sustainable Development and Health" (2002), with Simon Bullock, in Promoting Health: Politics and Practice, edited by Lee Adams, Mary Amos and James Munro. SAGE Publications. doi:10.4135/9781446220269.n3.
• Contributor to Words Into Action (2002), edited by Lilian Chatterjee. International Institute for Environment and Development. ISBN 1-84369-191-0.
• "The Politics of Radical Partnerships" (2004), in Survival for a Small Planet: The Sustainable Development Agenda, edited by Tom Bigg. Earthscan. ISBN 1-84407-100-2.
• Contributor to Creating Connections: Health Inequalities on the Island of Ireland (2006), Public Health Alliance Ireland. ISBN 0-9552227-0-1.
• A Green New Deal (2008), with Andrew Simms, Ann Pettifor, Larry Elliott, Colin Hines, Tony Juniper, Caroline Lucas and others. New Economics Foundation.
• A Possible Pathway to Building Revolutionary Change (2016), Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development.
• Fiscal+ Accelerators on the Road to Zero (2019), prepared for the Labour Shadow Treasury Team.
• A National Plan for the UK: From Austerity to the Age of the Green New Deal (2019), with Larry Elliott, Colin Hines, Tony Leggett, Caroline Lucas, Richard Murphy and others. New Weather Institute. ISBN 978-0-9926919-0-5.

See also

• Environmentalism
• Individual and political action on climate change