The Royal Eco-Warrior: Environmentalism Remains at the Centre of King Charles’ Work

Environmentalism is the cause at the centre of King Charles III’s life’s work. For years, he was mocked as a batty aristo who talked to his plants. But his advocacy track record is solid: He began calling attention to deforestation in the early 1960s, long before greenhouse gases became a mainstream concern. He campaigned to keep plastics out of the oceans. As Prince of Wales, he created the Duchy Home Farm in 1985, decades ahead of organic farming. He installed solar panels at Clarence House and hydroelectric turbines and biomass boilers at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. (Pointedly, he draws the line at wind farming, calling the structures a blight upon his beloved landscape.) And, while it sounds wacky at first blush, he converted the fuel system of his Aston Martin to run on wine and cheese, a racy showpiece for alternative energy.

When Charles took the stage to give the opening address at the UN Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, in Dubai in December, he called for “transformational action” by world leaders. As the head of state for the U.K. and 14 Commonwealth countries, his words have new gravitas: “We are taking the natural world outside balanced norms and limits, and into dangerous uncharted territory. Our choice now is a starker and darker one: How dangerous are we actually prepared to make our world?” 

While at the summit, he appears to have taken a page from his late mother’s arsenal of soft diplomacy, and the subtle sending of messages through fashion. For his speech, he wore a tie bearing the Greek flag. His father was a Greek prince, after all. But the Greek press read the neckpiece as a gesture of support, in light of the diplomatic stalemate between British PM Rishi Sunak and Greek President Kyriakos Mitsotakis over the repatriation of the Elgin marbles from the British museum to their homeland. “An obvious message,” claimed The Greek Times, “perhaps much stronger than any statement.”

Further, Charles was dogged by unpleasant controversy back home over the release of the book Endgame – the Dutch version named the monarch as one of the family members who questioned the colour of son Harry’s first child ahead of his birth.

Nevertheless, Charles was clear in his call to arms, which was capped with a rhetorical flourish: “The Earth does not belong to us,” he said. “We belong to the Earth.”

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