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| FEATURES | BY RUTH GORB |
 Dr Mayer Hillman |
There are bicycles propped on both sides of the hall of Mayer Hillman’s house in Hampstead. The whole family make their way round London on them; they wouldn’t dare do otherwise. A well-known champion of two wheels, Hillman says the bike suffers from having been invented over 100 years too early. “Imagine if someone today came up with the idea of a mode of transport that got you from door-to-door, was food for your health, was low cost and didn’t give off fumes,” he says. There you have it. No fumes – the fumes that are contributing to global catastrophe, says Hillman. Car-drivers are all in denial about the long-term effects of the carbon monoxide which is accumulating in the atmosphere. Ostrich-like, we say there is no way round it, it’s just modern life, but Mayer Hillman says there is a solution. The solution is the subject of his forthcoming book, How We Can Save the Planet. Like all pioneering thinkers, Dr Hillman has been labelled a crank. Half an hour in his company, and you are a believer. He is evangelistic, a man of huge intellectual energy and passionate conviction. He is also, thanks to all that cycling, extraordinarily fit for his 73 years. We talk first (or rather, he talks) of climate change. Look, he says, at the flooding of York, at the retreating glaciers, at the heat-wave of last year that killed 160,000 people. He shows me a graph of the rise of carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere, and of the rising temperature, from 1860 to the present day. It is horrifyingly dramatic, and it is, says Hillman, directly related to human activity. He burns with the desire to spread his gospel. He writes, gives papers at conferences and works into the evening. Dr Hillman is a self-confessed “frightening workaholic”. It is a devotion to duty he inherited from his much-loved mother – a GP who worked day and night, and was always on call. His family was Scottish-Jewish, originally from Lithuania, and he and his two brothers were brought up in Priory Road, West Hampstead. All his ancestors were rabbis but his father broke with tradition and became a stained glass artist and his work can be seen in many synagogues in London. Mayer and his brothers had to attend the yeshiva (theological college) every day after school and as a result, he says, “we all became militant atheists”. He went to the Bartlett School of Architecture after leaving UCS School, did a course in planning, and in 1954 set up practice in Hampstead. “As a child I took the face off my watch because the works were so much more interesting. It’s good to see how things work,” he says. His conversion was the 1963 proposal, Traffic in Towns. “It was monstrous,” he continues. “The idea that the car was such a boon that we had to re-structure our towns. It led to motorways, ring roads, high-rise car parks – it was an anathema to me and what my practice was about”. He left because there were too many other things to do. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the links between transport and environmental issues at Edinburgh University, and in order to take his ideas forward in 1970 he joined the Policy Studies Institute. He has been involved in what he calls “green research” ever since, and is now senior fellow emeritus at the institute. His famous investigation into the changing pattern of school children’s lives began then. His survey in 1970 showed 80 per cent of seven and eight-year-olds went to school on their own. A generation later, in 1990, it had dropped to nine per cent. But what is the proportion now? We have today, he says, a generation of “battery-bred children” who are kept indoors then chauffeur-driven to school through traffic-choked and polluted streets. Never mind the effect on their health, they grow up knowing nothing of freedom, risk or independence. What they do know about is holidays abroad. Mayer Hillman sees the lust for far-flung travel as only leading to disaster. “Of course there are attractions but the release of greenhouse gas emissions in air travel is about three times as potent as it is on the ground,” he warns. “How can the government think of providing more airports? There is total contradiction between their policy for growth and dealing with climate change. “My wife and I haven’t flown for years. I have been asked to give papers in Australia but I won’t go. I’d love to travel and I’d love to see New Zealand. But I can’t do it, and at the same time tell the world not to fly – that would be hypocrisy.” Is there, then, any hope? Can we save the planet? Disarmingly he says ‘yes’. There is only one way out: carbon rationing. How do you ration carbon? Easy, he says: “You have an allowance of how much you can use and every time you pay your gas or electricity bill, or fill your car with petrol, the amount is deducted. “Like a telephone card,” he says, “it would put the kibosh on long-haul travel. A round flight from London to New York would eat up two or three times your annual carbon ration.” Is it realistic? “You’d phase it in over 20 years, and yes, it would work. I remember the beginning of the Second World War, and when rationing was introduced there were no demos in Trafalgar Square, everything was shared between rich and poor alike. “We are in a more dangerous situation now than we were then. Carbon rationing is the only way.” He is, astonishingly, optimistic. “When there is an inevitability of change, it will happen. It must. This is the future of the planet, for God’s sake,” he says. n Mayer will be talking about his book as part of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival. He is in conversation with Roger Harrabin, Radio 4’s environmental correspondent, at New End Theatre, Hampstead, on Wednesday, May 19, at 1pm. n How We Can Save the Planet, is published by Penguin at the end of the month. |
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