Credit: Alamy

Chris Packham is holding a page of A4 paper up to the camera. It’s covered in handwriting, detailing 38 tasks. As we speak online on a Monday morning, he tells me, “I’m recovering from this, which was my weekend to-do list.” Most things seem to be ticked off. He’s ferociously productive. He says he doesn’t need much sleep, makes notes on his phone when he goes to bed (“apparently that’s bad for me”) and wakes up thinking about the tasks for the day. Right now, he needs to fix his electric car because the handbrake is jammed. I’m sure he’ll be driving again soon. It’s hard to imagine Packham at a standstill for long.

Near the top of the TV presenter, naturalist and campaigner’s agenda this year is taking Rishi Sunak’s government to court. He’s been granted a judicial review by the High Court to challenge the government’s decision to row back on key environmental policies that were designed to help the UK reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Packham and his legal team will argue that it isn’t lawful to remove or delay these plans – such as the transition to zero emission vehicles, gas boiler replacements and improved home insulation – without having others in place to ensure the targets within the Climate Change Act are met.

Packham feels a growing weight of responsibility for the state of the planet. In his Channel 4 documentary last year, Is It Time to Break the Law?, he said, “I carry an enormous burden of guilt, particularly when it comes to biodiversity loss ... I got my first pair of binoculars in 1970 and since then we’ve lost 69 per cent of the world’s wildlife ... Of course it’s my fault. I’ve been part of a generation of conservationists who have completely failed to protect the thing that they are meant to love more than anything else.”

He’s alarmed by last year’s State of Nature report, which evidences the loss of biodiversity in the UK. We’re one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world and our wildlife continues to decline, with nearly one in six species in Great Britain at risk of extinction. He tells me, “We’ve got the finest bunch of naturalist recorders and scientists anywhere in the world. That data is pretty infallible ... What it tells us is that we’re in a terrible mess and we need to act very quickly. Well, at the age of 63, that’s what I’m still trying to do. Act quickly. So obviously those who are not even putting their trainers on are not my favourite people.”

Just Stop Oil testimony

Packham has already stood in a courtroom this year, appearing at Isleworth Crown Court as a witness for a young music student, Cressie Gethin, on trial for causing a “public nuisance”. In the summer of 2022 Gethin climbed a motorway gantry as part of a Just Stop Oil protest. Packham was directly affected, as he ended up stuck in traffic on the M25 and arrived four or five hours late for work.

Although Packham was inconvenienced by the protest, he told the court he used the opportunity to consider the motivations of the activists. They held their action two days after the government’s net zero strategy was declared unlawful, for being too weak to meet legally-binding targets, and one day after the UK recorded its highest ever temperature at 40.3⁰C.

The court treated Gethin’s motivation as irrelevant to the crime. She wasn’t allowed to call expert witnesses who could explain the threat of climate breakdown that she was trying to avert. Packham was only allowed to give evidence as a witness because he was directly affected by her protest. I asked him how he felt about his day in court. “Well, I have enormous sympathy for a 22-year-old music student who is terrified of her potential future. And since no one is listening to her, she seeks to climb onto a gantry imperilling her life to try and communicate her important message. I understand her motives. I empathise and sympathise with those motives. Anyone who doesn’t would have to be pretty inhuman.”

The UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst, released a statement earlier this year expressing his grave concerns about the UK’s regressive treatment of climate activists. Packham references it and tells me, “I think that day I was exposed to that firsthand. I mean, it’s one thing reading about it on social media or talking to other people who are involved in trying to secure our right to justice and protest and whatever. But when you go and experience it and you stand in court and you look at a young 22-year-old woman who essentially has acted on her conscience, but she’s not allowed to say that, and she faces a potential sentence of 10 years ... I was really disturbed by the whole thing. I came home and I was in a really strange mood. I felt very, very sad. I felt incredibly angry that we’ve allowed this to happen.” He points out that these laws could be used to suppress any type of protest and says he finds that “absolutely terrifying”. Gethin was found guilty and handed a suspended 12-month prison sentence.

An eco-zealot?

Packham knows that certain sections of the media regularly brand him an “eco-loon or eco-zealot”. He characterises himself differently, “I’m a conservationist and environmentalist. I care passionately about protecting all life on this planet, and I don’t want it on my conscience, nor our species’ conscience, that we were responsible for a mass extermination event. I don’t think that’s a great legacy for a species which is so intelligent, creative, adaptable, resourceful.”

Does he ever feel upset or anxious about things written about him? “No, it makes me feel like I’ve got to try harder.” He looks outside to his garden, where his gates were burned down in an arson attack in 2021 when two masked men set fire to a Land Rover outside his property. He suspects he was targeted for campaigning against certain hunting and shooting activities, but he doesn’t know because the men were never caught. He tells me the burnt gates were made of oak and “the wood looked beautiful. It was all iridescent, like fish scales, like mackerel. So my friend and I took the gates down and we cut them up very carefully and we made them into three tables and then I had them set in resin. I gave one to a friend, I’ve got one myself, and the other one I’m going to auction for charity.”

He also turned one of the burnt gateposts into a bench and had fox heads carved into either end, “so I now go and sit on that and look at the birds and the bees and the butterflies. The mission is simple: take their violent, aggressive, disruptive energy and turn it into something positive.”

He tells me that the arson attack only served to fuel his determination, making him want to “get up earlier” and “add more things to my list”. In the years since, he has certainly ramped up his campaigning. Packham is a founder of Wild Justice, patron of multiple wildlife charities, president of the RSPCA, vice-president of the RSPB and an ambassador for Veganuary. He’s also battling against fox hunting, salmon farming, badger culls and raptor persecution (the illegal killing of birds of prey, such as eagles or hawks). It’s a lot to keep track of and he publishes his own newsletter, “Love and Rage”, to share updates on his activism with his followers.

The spirit of punk

The punk movement, he reminds me, used to say that “anger is an energy”. Punk has been a huge influence on his life. I knew he was a fan of the music but didn’t realise that he sang too, I say. He interjects, amused, “‘ ‘Singing’ ... may not be exactly how it would be defined by any of those people who had to listen to it, but yeah, I did play in a punk rock band and I was a massive follower of the movement. And of course the movement was not actually so much about music or fashion. It was about attitude. And that attitude was very much about: do it yourself, not taking no for an answer, questioning authority.” He says for all its talk of anarchy and destruction, it was “an enormously creative movement” which generated a legacy for people like him who “have carried that attitude through their lives”.

When he first appeared as a presenter on the BBC’s Really Wild Show in 1986, he looked definitely punk, with bleached blonde hair in a mohawk. He’s always been interested in aesthetics, and his sister is the fashion designer Jenny Packham, known for her gowns and wedding dresses often favoured by movie stars. Art competes with nature as a core passion of his life. His mum used to take him to galleries as a child and he tells me he recently took the train to Vienna and “spent seven days from opening to closing time in art museums” studying various works.

At home, he has a studio where he makes paper cuts and sculptures. He’s printing some of his paper-cut designs onto T-shirts for sale, but tells me his sculptures are purely a personal passion. “I don’t like anything I’ve ever made or painted or sculpted, obviously, and I haven’t shown them to anyone. They’re in my garden. People can peer over the fence and have a look, I suppose, if they want, but that’s it,” he says.

“Forgive me, I don’t mean to be rude, I’m not making them for you, I’m making them for me. Because I have a need to do that for myself. And therefore, they kind of die at the point of near completion because I’m never going to be satisfied with them and I don’t need anyone else to look at them and say they’re shit or they’re brilliant.”

The idea of being impossible to satisfy recurs later in our conversation when we talk about his parents. He says that they found him “quirky, obsessive and troublesome” as a child. Were they amazed by what he went on to achieve? He replies, “Not really. My parents were very critical of both myself and my sister. If I’m ruthlessly honest, one of the reasons why we both have perceived success – and I would call it perceived success because it’s not the way I would measure success necessarily – is that we can’t satisfy ourselves ... I’ve never been a Chris Packham fan. I see all the flaws. I see all the inadequacies. I see all of the things that I could do better. Ruthlessly self-critical. And that’s actually a very powerful driving force.

“If you’re initially trying to satisfy your parents and they can never be satisfied, you just work harder and harder and harder. And then of course, you’re less interested in your parents because you become an independent person yourself. And you’re in a position where you’ve got to satisfy yourself, but they’ve set very high standards. So you set even higher standards and you never meet them. Maybe that’s a cruel gift. But without it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Autism diagnosis

Packham was diagnosed with a form of autism when he was in his forties and has made powerful programmes about neurodiversity, including Asperger’s and Me and Inside Our Autistic Minds. This year he’s filming a new series of Inside Our Minds, which will focus on ADHD and dyslexia. I’m curious to know whether having a diagnosis, a label, made any difference to him. He says that because the diagnosis came so late in his life, he’d already developed coping strategies, so “for a long time, when people asked me that question I’d say it had no impact.” But he says a couple of people who knew him before his diagnosis say that he’s “changed quite considerably” since. They’ve told him that he was “crap at hiding” his behaviour and “trashed relationships” trying to conceal it.

He reckons it’s hard to disentangle how much he’s changed as a result of better understanding his own behaviour, and how much is “in the context of a changing world”. He’s more confident talking about it, he says, including to people he doesn’t know. For example, he’ll now explain to work colleagues how it will benefit him, and therefore the team, if things are done a certain way. He shows me that he’s currently wearing his indoor shirt and trousers, “and every time I come indoors, I put the same clothes on.”

In the past, his family have become so fed up with him wearing exactly the same outfit indoors everyday that they’ve burned these clothes. It happened when he was a child, and his previous partner and step-daughter have done the same thing. Packham breaks into peals of laughter at these memories and is quick to reassure me that it wasn’t done with malice. He understands their frustration, but he also feels better understood now.

Similarly, if left to himself, he’ll choose to eat the same food. He tells me that when his partner Charlotte was away last week, “I had pizza and chips every night. Same pizza, same chips, same time.” He says Charlotte accepts that and he doesn’t feel any need to justify it. “I just say that’s who I am. That’s what makes me comfortable and I need to be comfortable here because when I’m [outside], I’m not always comfortable.” He concludes that the diagnosis has made a difference, “but not instantaneously. I grew into the benefits of having that tag.”

Packham does things that would make most people deeply uncomfortable. He’s admirably open about his struggles and doesn’t shy away from telling the truth, as he sees it. He’s confronted powerful people and groups in his defence of the natural world, and made himself a target for abuse and attack. I marvel at how he has the stamina and stomach for it all. “I’m just a bit of a belligerent fighter, to be quite honest with you,” he says. “George Monbiot [the journalist and environmental activist] and I joke that it’s a last-stand situation. And I always say to him, ‘I’ll see you on the hill, make sure you bring your wellies, it’s bound to be raining.’ And that’s it. I’m just in it to the end and there’s no option. I’ve nailed my colours to the mast. My heart is on my sleeve. I’m going to be on the hill fighting to the last and I won’t be alone. I think a growing number of people are beginning to wake up to the fact that we are in a fight to save life on Earth.”

This article is from New Humanist's summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.