John Elkington contributes to the Guardian's obituary of Anita Roddick

12 Sep 2007 – SA in the News

From the article:
*John Elkington writes:* “I love her like fury, but it’s like being trapped in a brown paper bag with a bluebottle,” a relative commented of his wife – and that was Anita for me. Like all true entrepreneurs, she fired on all cylinders, all the time. Working close to her would have driven me mad, but working alongside her in an extraordinary nexus of ethical, social, environmental and international development movements has been one of the great privileges of my life.

I cannot remember when our paths first crossed, but I covered her work in my 1987 book The Green Capitalists, when she said: “There is something magical about small companies run by people whose thinking was forged in the 60s. You sit down and ask not only how the business should be run, but also what should be done with the profits.”

At the time, many thought she was new to the game of green capitalism. She wasn’t: “Although some people may think we are recent converts, the reality is that these concerns were always there … the Body Shop dates from 1976 and we were already featuring Greenpeace’s anti-whaling campaign in 1977.”

In 1988, Anita supplied the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide, which I wrote with Julia Hailes and which sold 1m copies around the world. We were building on what she and Gordon had done at the Body Shop – and what groups like Friends of the Earth had done in areas like tropical timber products and CFCs. “Don’t just grin and bear it,” she encouraged readers. “As consumers, we have real power to effect change. We can ask questions about supply and manufacture. We can request new or different products. And we can use our ultimate power, voting with our feet and wallets – either buying a product somewhere else or not buying it at all.”

Anita helped us as we grew SustainAbility from 1987, advising business on sustainable development, but there was nothing special in that – she helped legions of people. Many thought her unreasonable, even crazy. But that’s typical of people who change the world.

Yes, she could get up people’s noses, castigating old-style capitalists as “dinosaurs in pinstripes,” and yet selling the Body Shop to L’Oréal, in which one of her least favourite companies – Nestlé – had a stake. But what a woman, what a heart, what a sense of humour, what a troublemaker!

Read the full obituary at The Guardian.