The big picture What I learned from 40 years of writing on the environment

Paul Brown was the Guardian’s environment correspondent from 1989 until 2005. He wrote his last column, Weatherwatch, last week after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Here he offers some final reflections.

- Paul Brown

We, in the climate business, all owe a great deal to Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Her politics were anathema to me and to many Guardian readers. But she prided herself on being a scientist before she was a politician.

It was Thatcher’s inquiring mind that first demanded a scientific briefing about the dangers of the hole in the ozone layer, and subsequently on another even greater potential catastrophe, Climate change. She was at the height of her influence on the international stage.

Meanwhile, the Guardian was getting more and more interested in the environment. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace had grown into large radical campaigning organisations, alongside more established ones like the WWF. Their young membership increasingly looked to the Guardian to report their activities and advertise green jobs.

‘As a general reporter on the paper, first assigned to cover nuclear power when the science editor was ill, I was allowed to sign on as a crew member of various Greenpeace ships. I went on voyages to block the Sellafield pipeline draining plutonium into the Irish Sea; I took trips round the coast highlighting sewage dumping and all manner of unlicensed chemical waste pipelines.

I began to report from international conferences trying to protect the seas and fish stocks, and best of all I spent three months in Antarctica on a Greenpeace boat that tried, and eventually succeeded, in getting Antarctica accepted by the international community as a world park. In Antarctica, I got 26 pieces in the paper via satellite - the first journalist to file direct from the icy continent.

As I came back, Thatcher was in New York warning the UN about the dangers of climate change. Shortly afterwards, I found myself reporting from Geneva as she and other European leaders warned that the world was headed for disaster if it did not cut down on the use of fossil fuels.