I didn’t grow up saying I want to be an environmental scientist – that didn’t really exist when I was growing up, I had to look really hard for that as a sixth-year student. I knew I liked animals and I thought for a while, I might be a vet. But I also knew I was really interested in the world around me and how it worked and what influence human beings have on all that. I set up the first Green Committee in my school, I was a member of the RSPCA, I was into anti-whaling… as a teenager, they were all the ways that you showed that you cared about the environment in the 1980s. Climate change really wasn’t on the agenda back then.
Some people have a lucky run in life and others get served up an unfair proportion of hardship and difficulty. I think I’ve been one of the lucky ones. When I look back, I think the greatest challenge I’ve faced is that, pre-Covid, I used to just travel all the time. I never ever had a week where I didn’t pack a suitcase. And I just did it, I didn’t think about it. I couldn’t do that now. Stopping because of Covid-19 has really made me gain perspective on the amount I traveled. And it wasn’t just international travel, living in Cork, you’re constantly pulled to Dublin. For years I traveled every week of my life, and that was hard. Doing my PhD in West Africa in 50 degree heat in an Islamic country was also a challenge but at the time I thought of it as an adventure!
Dr Tara Shine with her book How to Save Your Planet One Object At A Time. Picture: John AllenAs a mother, I think when you are asked what your proudest achievement is you always go to your kids. Mine are still alive, I haven’t broken them or left them behind somewhere! My book is another labour of love. I thought about writing a book for many years. When I finally got to it, it ended up being one of the busiest periods in my life so I wrote this book on weekends and at five o’clock in the morning, but I am really proud of it. When I hold it and I flick through it… I am really proud that I made that.
My greatest quality is kindness, I hope. I am trusting of people, I tend to see the best in them and I think that’s been rewarded. When I’ve trusted people, it’s always led to a good outcome. I am a very hopeful, optimistic person. I do believe that humanity is good underneath it all, and we will pull together and find our way out of all of it – Covid, the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis. I have to believe that.
I would like to be remembered as someone who didn’t shirk responsibility. Someone who saw that there was a problem, and at least tried to do something about it. And for being getting better as I got older at communicating what all of this is about and why it’s important. If I look back over the last 25 years of my working career, a lot of that has been environmental people getting things wrong in terms of the messaging, scaring people, doom and gloom.. and that just doesn’t work. So I hope I can be remembered as one of the people who changed that narrative and made climate action something that is for everybody and something that’s a positive thing.
The person I turn to most is my husband, Jeremy. He is always a rock of sense and infuriatingly right. It drives me crazy.
The greatest advice I was ever given was from my dad. I remember distinctly being 10 years old and being told “life isn’t fair.” It shook me, because fairness is at the core of my being, but I guess it’s great advice because it helps me not lose hope when I see unfairness. If I expected the world always to be fair and saw all these injustices I wouldn’t be able to go on, but my dad’s advice helped me realise I could work for fairness in an unfair world, and that has stood to me my whole life.
I think I am best at seeing the big picture and the practical application at the same time.
What surprises me is how short-sighted our leaders can be.
If I took a different fork in the road I would have applied to work full-time in Irish Aid. I used to work a lot as a consultant for Irish Aid and at one point in time I had the chance to throw my hat in the ring to become a diplomat… If I had done that I would hope I would have been an ambassador by now. That, or working for the United Nations.
This article was amended from the Irish Examiner’s Website. You can read the original here.
