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I was a member of the original Board of Directors of Friends of the Earth in the early 1970s and have been involved in public debates about environmental issues ever since. I have presented evidence to numerous public inquiries and parliamentary committees on forecasting, traffic modelling, cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment, and am a regular contributor to radio and television programmes and broadsheet newspapers on transport and risk themes.
I am intrigued by the persistence of attitudes to environmental risks. Ever since my involvement with Friends of the Earth almost 30 years ago, the same arguments, slogans and insults have been shouted past each other by the participants (or their descendants) in debates about the environment. My current work on both risk and transport issues seeks to understand these attitudes and the reasons for their persistence, in the hope of transforming shouting matches into more constructive dialogues.