Royals
The
Fascinating Backstory of King Charles III and His (Sometimes Controversial)
Environmental Crusading
His entry
into the movement might have started from the path the royals put him on, but
early in his life, he sought out his own mentors. Now he’s one of the most
influential thinkers on climate in the world.
By Erin
Vanderhoof
November 24,
2022
By Ken
Goff/Getty Images.
Most people
know by now that King Charles III really cares about the environment. It’s been
repeated often in the months since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, especially
by the people who admire him. What may be less known among the general public
is exactly how respected among environmental advocates he really is.
This year,
Charles reportedly canceled plans to attend COP27 in Egypt last week due to
advice from Liz Truss’s short-lived administration, which was upheld by the new
prime minister, but he did host a Buckingham Palace reception for over 200
politicians and activists who were on their way to Egypt. For Charles, trips to
the United Nations Climate Change Conferences are about more than keeping up
appearances—he actually participates. At 2015’s COP21 in Paris, where a
landmark treaty was set to be negotiated, Charles used his opening remarks to
remind the attendees to think of the world they were leaving their
grandchildren. On his last trip to COP26 in Glasgow, Charles gave four separate
speeches and introduced a video message from his mother.
One obvious
reason for his passion for the environment is that he was simply in the right
place at the right time. Historians have named 1970 as the year when threats to
the environment broke through to the mainstream, and as a 22-year-old finishing
up his university degree in anthropology and archeology and planning his
career, the concern came naturally. For a handful of baby boomers, caring for
the environment became a countercultural lifestyle, and though Charles was
never a committed member of the Back-to-the-Land Movement, some of his beliefs
and practices—from his organic farm at Highgrove to his concerns about
GMOs—weren’t too far off.
Still,
Charles remained unusually committed to environmental concerns even after the
’70s drew to a close, perhaps because it spoke to something deeper in him.
Through speeches about the environment spanning five decades, he has described
his interest in the environment in elemental terms, speaking of beauty,
awareness, synthesis, and imagination. He has also been remarkably astute when
it comes to incorporating new information and following the movement’s
buzzwords. But engaging with his history in the movement also helps illustrate
some of the pitfalls that have made action regarding the climate much harder to
achieve.
The future
king made his initial forays into environmental concerns long before global
warming was even on the agenda. On a drab day in February 1970, Charles
followed his father, Prince Philip, into a room at Strasbourg’s city hall for a
conference about wildlife conservation. In a dark suit, looking younger than
his 22 years, Charles sat in the audience as his father delivered a speech
about resource depletion, endangered wildlife, and the need for more land to be
set aside for conservation. These were the issues that Philip spent most of his
life committed to, and they were fairly normal concerns for European royalty at
the time. Charles and Philip were joined by four other European princes at the
conference, which brought together government representatives and activists to
launch the European Conservation Year.
By 1970,
Charles had already been involved with the European Conservation Year planning
for nearly two years. Many of Charles’s decisions about education and
employment were planned by Queen Elizabeth II and her advisers, and his initial
forays into the world of environmental activism were motivated by their desire
for him to form closer connections in Wales. In 1968, Charles started preparing
for his responsibilities as heir apparent by spending more time in the nation.
First, he chaired a committee tasked with planning the nation’s participation
in the upcoming European Conservation Year, his first time serving as the head
of a meeting. The next year, he returned to take a summer course in the Welsh
language before his lavish investiture in Caernarfon Castle in July 1969.
Charles’s
1970 trip to France was part of a larger plan to launch him into his career in
public life. His university studies would come to an end that spring, so for
the year following his investiture, he committed to a hectic travel schedule to
serve as a royal apprentice before beginning his military training at the Royal
Navy College, Dartmouth. After leaving the conference in Strasbourg, Charles
traveled to Paris to attend the state funeral of French leader Charles de
Gaulle.
One week
after his trip to Strasbourg, he launched the Countryside in Wales conference
in Cardiff, where he delivered his first-ever speech on the environment, noting
that he was “personally fascinated by the problems of conservation at a time
when the whole idea had become immensely fashionable.” The speech lays out some
of the things he learned the previous week. He mentioned the scourge of
“pollution in all its cancerous forms,” the growing issue of “nonreturnable
bottles and indestructible plastic containers,” and how conservation is about
“being aware of the total environment that we live in.”
In 2020,
Charles returned to the speech and read portions of it in a video shared to the
royal family’s YouTube channel, and it sounded surprisingly fresh. But one
segment in which Charles discusses overpopulation wasn’t revisited in the
video, perhaps due to its now controversial nature. “In many places the number
of people is increasing faster than the resources of the local environment can
cope, thereby exaggerating the problems of conservation,” he said in 1970.
“There are two main schools of thought here. One is that nothing need be done
about population because nature is bound to react by producing a particularly
virulent plague or virus, and the other is that something certainly needs to be
done by man to prevent his overpopulation.”
The rhetoric
about a virus seems almost directly pulled from one of Philip’s more infamous
comments from the 1960s—about returning in another life as a virus to wipe out
some of the world’s population—though Charles moves on without endorsing his
father’s idea. Though it’s strange to look back at this moment now, the idea
that widespread population control was an urgent concern spread throughout the
English-speaking world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Philip eagerly
embraced the movement for a confluence of reasons. As an avid hunter and
outdoorsman, Philip had a personal investment in conservation, and he
approached environmental problems with the perspective of a natural scientist.
There’s also
a long-running connection between the British royal family and the early
scientists whose research made concern for the environment and the “quantity”
and “quality” of the population into major issues. During the 19th century,
Britain saw a population boom due to the Industrial Revolution, all while its
citizens were moving to cities where disorder, crime, and pollution
proliferated. Movements toward appreciation of nature and the eugenic
improvement of society both have their roots in the British aristocracy, and
many of its practitioners were awarded by and even close to the
royals—including some people who were alive during Philip's lifetime. Charles
Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution and popularized the study of
nature among the British aristocracy, was elected as a the Fellow of the Royal
Society by a secret ballot that included family members. His cousin, Francis
Galton, well-known for research into the nature of heredity and for founding
the British Eugenics Society, was knighted by Queen Victoria. The next
generation of natural scientists who were even closer to the family. Sir
Bernard Mallet, a statistician who eventually became the president of the
Eugenics Society, was married to one of the queen’s ladies in waiting. Lord Thomas
Horder served as the personal doctor to Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth
II, juggling the duties with a role influencing international population
control policy, which informed the use of forced sterilization abroad.
As historian
Emily Klancher Merchant notes, the traditional motivations for eugenics—the
quest to improve the “quality” of the human population—was supplanted by a push
to moderate population growth for the sake of economic development and resource
preservation. It rested on a theory that economic growth will lead the global
poor to have smaller families. “This is based on British history, because
Britain is where the Industrial Revolution happened, and these were the
demographic consequences,” Merchant told Vanity Fair. “‘This is what happened
in England, so this is what’s going to happen everywhere,’ is how demographers
understood it.”
This
motivated demographers to see family-planning as a tool for poverty
alleviation. “We had population growth without industrialization and no social
revolution to create small families. For demographers, this is the problem, and
the initial solution that they propose is decolonization and kick-starting
their modernization processes,” she said. “Modernization is going to create
this new balance between low mortality and low fertility. Population will grow,
but industrialization will take care of everybody, and everyone will have high
living standards.”
Merchant
added that the scientific evidence that connected population control with
either economic growth or improvements in conservation has always been thin at
best, but it became a central concern for the environmental movement as it grew
in the 1970s. It remains a concern for some, even as scientific advances began
to unravel their underpinnings and global critics attacked the movement for
racist objectives and coercive practices in developing countries. Prince Philip
continued to mention it into his 90s.
“This is
still a very common thought—it seems almost like a truism,” Merchant said.
“People are destroying the environment, which is true. So, if there’s fewer
people, then maybe there will be fewer points for environmental destruction. It
seems really obvious to natural scientists even now.” But there has never been
a one-to-one connection between population and consumption of resources. “They
don’t alway realize that the human activities that hurt the environment are
determined by social, political, and economic structures.”
For most of
his life both Charles and his sons, Prince Harry and Prince William, have
mentioned Philip as their main inspiration to become environmental activists.
But during the 1970s, Charles’s and Philip’s environmental interests began to
diverge. Philip stayed involved in the conservation movement through his
leadership at the World Wildlife Fund, which kept him tuned in to the latest
scientific advances when it came to biodiversity loss and warming temperatures
around the globe. In a 1982 speech at the University of Salford, Philip first
mentioned the greenhouse effect and its potential threat to life on earth, just
one year after The New York Times first ran a story about it on the front page.
By 1986, he was describing the threat in apocalyptic terms. “The damage is
being done, here and now, with long-term consequences just as destructive as a
nuclear holocaust,” he said in a speech to the European Council of
International Schools.
Charles, on
the other hand, largely moved away from his father’s interest in population
control when he found another set of mentors and started to embrace a much
broader vision of what counts as an environmental concern. In 1973, the
heterodox economist E.F. Schumacher released his book Small Is Beautiful: A
Study of Economics as If People Mattered, and it made its way into Charles’s
hands. By the end of the year, Schumacher visited the royals at Buckingham
Palace, and Charles became a committed supporter of his ideas and institutions.
Schumacher’s
work, which Charles has quoted in speeches for decades, has retained its
relevance into the 21st century. “He wrote about getting beyond GDP
growth—living within the limits of the planet and reorganizing economic
activity such that people on the planet can truly thrive,” said Jared Spears,
director of communications and resources at the Schumacher Center for a New
Economics. Schumacher’s message was explicitly anti-fossil fuel because he was
writing “against the backdrop of oil crises and shortages in the 1970s.”
Spears
explained that the ideas only have added resonance now that the environmental
movement is centered on fighting climate change. “In a way, the opposing forces
have been the same for the past 50 years, but we know a lot more,” he said.
“There’s a lot more you can say about the limits of scale, the limits of
economic growth, and the reality that industrialized capitalism as it’s been
operating for the past couple of decades is certainly not serving the people or
the planet.”
Throughout
the early 1980s, Charles kept his affiliations with the Prince of Wales
Countryside Committee and other nature organizations. But his concern for
nature and the environment were primarily expressed through the hobby of
organic farming, which began when the Duchy of Cornwall bought Highgrove House
in 1980 and his controversial forays into critiquing modern architecture. He
also had to contend with widespread mockery in the press. As the Thatcher-era
tabloids took aim at the urban left, environmental issues were increasingly
referred to as “fringe” and “loony,” alongside other priorities of the Labour
Party. Stories about Charles’s enthusiasm for talking to plants, his
unconventional solutions to heating his own estates, and the jokes he made about
banning hairspray in his home to save the ozone layer had the effect of making
Charles seem political while also painting environmentally minded politicians
as out of touch.
A watershed
moment came in 1987, when Charles served as the UK’s patron for the European
Year for the Environment and presented the first round of Better Environment
Awards for Industry with a speech where he took on increasing
“anti-conservation” sentiment in the world at large. By the time he appeared as
a guest in a 1989 documentary about global warming and recommitted himself as a
spokesperson for global warming, he was doing so in concert with then senator
Al Gore, who first learned about the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic
changes to the climate as a student at Harvard in the 1960s. As science became
more incontrovertible, Gore became the US government official who most avidly
called for action to protect the environment. In the mid-1980s, Charles met
Gore during a trip to Washington, and the pair traded ideas for decades. (In
1990, Charles made another documentary called The Earth in Balance, and in
1992, Gore released his book Earth in the Balance.)
By the time
the queen started speaking out about climate change in the early 2000s, the
issue had become thoroughly mainstream, and by 2009 both of Britain’s major
political parties had it as a part of their platform. By connecting his
interest in conservation to his old-fashioned tastes and architecture and his
passion for religion, Charles formulated a way of talking about the environment
that focused on building consensus based on philosophical pursuits and shared
values. In some ways, he was prescient to think less about the science of
climate change and focus more on building a positive vision of society.
At the same
time, abandoning explicit politics meant that his work became about preserving
the status quo. For nearly three decades now, Charles has focused his rhetoric
around the idea of “sustainable development” and worked with major corporations
to come up with plans to reach carbon-neutrality over the next few decades.
This year, at COP27, the biggest issue up for discussion was explicitly
political and it might be one Charles will never be able to address. Before the
conference, vulnerable countries organized to put “Loss and Damage” at the
center of the agenda, demanding financial compensation for the disproportionate
impact of extreme weather and climate change they have already faced.
One of
Charles’s main mentors might have trained him for the situation, but it’s
unlikely that he could really put the ideas into action. Spears, the director
of communications at the Schumacher Center, pointed out that the fundamental
importance of direct democracy was at the cornerstone of Schumacher’s ideas.
“If we find a solution to the problem, it won’t come at COP27,” he said. “It
will come from the communities on the ground who are working hard to come up
with democratic solutions.”
Ultimately
it might have actually been impossible for the future king to truly embrace the
ideas of localism, and an unelected monarch might never be the person who will
bring about egalitarian, sustainable communities. But Charles did find a way to
preserve environmental rhetoric even when it became unfashionable, and due in
part to his decades of work, concern for the environment now feels central to
British identity. As the wave of direct action coming from young adults in
Britain is already proving, it’s the next generation’s turn to carry that
further.
Constitutional
expert says Tory leader’s break from political consensus over target for
greenhouse gasses will require monarch to choose his words carefully
Richard
Palmer
Sat 5 Apr
2025 18.00 BST
King Charles
will have to temper his public support for net zero after Kemi Badenoch broke
the political consensus over the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Senior royal
sources have conceded that the 76-year-old monarch, who has spent more than
half a century highlighting environmental challenges, will have to choose his
words more carefully now that the Conservatives under Badenoch have said it
will be impossible for the UK to hit net zero by 2050.
“The only
way that we can regain it [trust] is to tell the unvarnished truth – net zero
by 2050 is impossible,” the Conservative leader said last month.
Charles III
has spoken publicly about how vital it is to hit net zero by the 2050 target
date, set by Theresa May’s government in 2019 and agreed upon by subsequent
administrations. Successive prime ministers have used the king’s long track
record on campaigning for climate action to help promote Britain’s leadership
on combatting the challenges.
In December
2023, for example, the king told the Cop28 UN climate change conference in
Dubai that more urgent action was needed to bring the world towards a
zero-carbon future. “After all, ladies and gentlemen, in 2050 our grandchildren
won’t be asking what we said, they will be living with the consequences of what
we did or didn’t do,” he said.
At that
point, the main UK political parties were agreed on the issue. Now the monarch
runs the risk of becoming embroiled in a party political dispute. In addition
to the change in the Conservative view, Reform wants to scrap net zero
completely.
Craig
Prescott, a constitutional expert at Royal Holloway, University of London,
suggested the king must be less specific about his own views on the target. “I
think if you take the view that the monarchy has to be ‘two or three steps
away’ from party politics then, as party politics changes, the monarchy should
change,” he said.
Charles, who
flies to Italy tomorrow with Queen Camilla for a state visit that lasts until
Thursday, will still put tackling the climate crisis and other environmental
challenges at the heart of his monarchy.
The work to
create a more sustainable future will be a feature of the trip. In Rome, the
king will join a meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and
attended by business leaders to hear how Britain and Italy are working together
on the transition to clean energy. In Ravenna he will meet farmers whose land
and crops have been severely affected by devastating floods in the region in
the past few years.
He and
Camilla, who celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary at a state banquet in
Rome on Wednesday evening, will visit the Colosseum and celebrate close defence
ties between the two countries, in spite of the political differences between
Keir Starmer’s Labour party and Italy’s rightwing leader, Giorgia Meloni.
The need to
avoid involving the king in party political controversy has been highlighted
after documents released on Friday revealed that the monarch secretly met
Prince Andrew to discuss his future and was twice briefed about plans for him
to be involved in a £2.4bn investment fund run by an alleged Chinese spy, Yang
Tengbo. Buckingham Palace insisted Yang, since banned from Britain despite
protesting his innocence, was not specifically mentioned.
Prince
William is likely to attend the Cop30 UN climate conference in Belém, Brazil,
in November and may also be more guarded than before about his views on
achieving net zero, although royals may still be expected to reflect on
government policy on the international stage.
Any
silencing of the monarch and his heir threatens to weaken Britain’s voice
abroad, according to some environmental groups. Shaun Spiers, executive
director of the environmental thinktank Green Alliance, said Charles might be
unable to speak out specifically on the 2050 target but could talk generally
about the need for climate action. “The king is a well-respected leader and it
would be a shame if he didn’t speak on it, particularly internationally,” he
said.
Reshima
Sharma, deputy head of politics at Greenpeace UK, pointed to popular support
for green policies. “King Charles has long been an important advocate for
action to clean up our environment and tackle climate change. While the
monarchy must remain politically neutral, thankfully climate action continues
to receive the kind of popular support that politicians can only dream of. This
is reflected across voters of all stripes,” she said.
Buckingham
Palace declined to comment.
