John Vidal, the Guardian’s former ecosystem editor, has died aged 74. He died peacefully on Thursday in medical center, where by he was getting addressed for most cancers.
Vidal documented on the environment for the Guardian for almost a few decades right until retiring in 2017, calling it “the biggest career on Earth”. Later on, he continued to report from close to the globe with his trademark vitality and enthusiasm and released a book, Fevered Earth: How Disorders Arise When We Hurt Nature, in June this yr.
The tributes to Vidal bear in mind his revolutionary environmental journalism and spotlight his passion for social justice, the underdog and putting individuals at the centre of his tales.
Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, mentioned: “John was a passionate, heat, sort, unforgettable person and amazing journalist – a one particular-off and a accurate Guardian legend. His commitment to covering the weather and nature crisis was very clear in his gripping and vital reporting, abundant with humanity – and he acquired there just before everyone else. He was much liked by his colleagues, and we will pass up him deeply.”
Sir Jonathon Porritt, a single of the UK’s earliest and very best acknowledged environmentalists, explained: “I’ve never ever acknowledged any journalist who so successfully blended uncompromising integrity, understated courage, mischief, irreverence and tough-hitting, compassionate eloquence in all his crafting. He was just a amazing mate and accurate champion for the ecosystem.”
Paul Webster, the editor of the Observer, explained: “John provided vivid and essential journalism and wrote wonderfully and passionately about the atmosphere, groundbreaking coverage of issues that are now central to community existence. He was an indefatigable reporter and a warm, witty and generous colleague who was considerably cherished by his fellow journalists.”
Vidal was born in Ghana in 1949, and returned 60 many years later to come across the midwife who experienced sent him as element of a tale on inhabitants advancement. Ahead of joining the Guardian, he labored for Agence France-Presse, North Wales Newspapers and the Cumberland Information. He also wrote McLibel: Burger Culture on Demo, a ebook about the suing of campaigners by McDonald’s.
Vidal’s reporting took him to each corner of the world, notably the troubled locations where men and women were being struggling, these as the Niger delta, Rwanda and Kabul. A collection of epic reporting outings took him on local weather journeys from the Himalayan glaciers of Nepal to the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh in 2009 to the glaciers of the Andes to the Amazon rainforest in 2010 from Egypt and war-torn Sudan to South Africa in 2011 and down the duration of the excellent Mekong River in 2015.
One particular vacation, reporting on starvation in Malawi, led Vidal to established up the Gumbi instruction fund to educate small children in a person of Malawi’s poorest villages. It carries on its get the job done nowadays.
Vidal also typically brought on “good trouble”. His revelation of a leaked draft agreement at the UN local climate summit in Copenhagen triggered uproar, with developing countries reacting furiously to a text they observed as handing extra energy to abundant nations. He was also imprisoned in the Faroe Islands while reporting on whaling.
Paul Brown, who as environment correspondent sat up coming to Vidal in the Guardian newsroom for 16 several years, reported: “John’s expertise was partly his skill as a author, exactly where he wrote persuasive copy that manufactured environmental topics occur alive. It was also his unorthodox tactic that obtained his tales in the paper, for example the place he acquired a career as a security guard to report from the other facet on how the authorities dealt with the Newbury anti-bypass protesters. Previously mentioned all he was a champion of the underdog, normally cheerful but relentless in pursuit of a story he imagined really worth telling.”
John Sauven, the former head of Greenpeace Uk, named Vidal a legend: “He was an irresistible, booming presence at so numerous critical times. He was there in the Amazon and the Arctic very long in advance of they became celebrated results in – in actuality he was often the cause an environmental menace was finally recognised. John was a incredible good friend to Indigenous peoples and to campaigners risking their lives on the frontline. But most of all he was a fine journalist.”