Herbert Girardet

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Herbert Girardet (born 25 May 1943) is a German-British writer, filmmaker, lecturer and international consultant.

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Life and work

Herbert Girardet was born in 1943 in Essen, Germany, [1] the son of a publishing executive. After reading history at Tübingen and Berlin universities, he moved to London in 1964 and embraced the nascent counterculture then taking hold there: the literary editor Diana Athill, who knew him during this time, described him in her memoir Make Believe as "the drop-out son of a rich German family... deep in the process of discovering his own loathing of capitalism, violence, and racism." [2]

In 1971, as a community worker in Notting Hill Gate, Girardet befriended the US Black Power activist Hakim Jamal, a published author. The they decided to join forces to set up a publishing enterprise ‘The First Caribbean Publishing Company’ for producing educational materials on black history and emancipation in Georgetown, Guyana. But this  project quickly foundered amid the chaos caused by Jamal's mental instability. Arriving back in London soon afterwards, Girardet returned to academia and received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and economics from the London School of Economics in 1975.

Since then, Girardet has worked as a cultural and urban ecologist – as a writer, filmmaker, lecturer and international consultant – specialising in ‘regenerative development’. He is the author and co-author of 14 books and reports, and 50 TV documentaries primarily concerned with the interaction between a global civilisation and the world’s environment. He is a recipient of a UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental services. He has written in publications such as Resurgence, The Ecologist , Green Futures, Urban Futures, Habitat Debate, The Guardian , The Independent and The Observer .[ citation needed ]

He is co-founder and honorary member of the World Future Council, and a full member of the Club of Rome. He has been a consultant to UN Habitat and UNEP, and to cities such as London, Vienna, Riyadh and Bristol. As inaugural "thinker in residence’, he developed a green development strategy for Adelaide which has been fully implemented. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a visiting professor at the University of the West of England.

He is married with two grown-up sons, and lives with his wife Barbara in Tintern, Monmouthshire.

Books

Nine of these books have been published in various foreign-language editions.

Television documentaries

Herbert Girardet has produced 50 television documentaries on sustainable development, including:

See also

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References

  1. The Environment Encyclopedia and Directory. Europa Publications Limited, 2001, S. 488.
  2. Diana Athill, Make Believe: A True Story (London: Granta, 2012), p. 118. Patrick French, in his introduction to Athill's book, attributes to Girardet the "perfectly Nabokovian name" of 'Herbert G. Herbert' - an error that has never been corrected in any subsequent edition.