Will Howard
Will Howard was an active campaigner for Cap & Share who died from cancer in 2008. For two years he co-ordinated the Cap & Share campaign in the UK, including running the website.
Will had boundless energy and in 2007, despite his illness, he cycled to Brussels on an electric bicycle to present work on Cap & Share to the European Commission.
On this page:
The Will Howard Memorial Lectures
Obituary from The Guardian
Obituary from the Feasta website
Tribute by Brian Davey
Will Howard Memorial Lectures
Feasta held the first Will Howard Memorial Lecture, "Climate Change: First, the bad news, then the good" on 18 April, 2008, in Dublin. The speakers were David Wasdell and Peter Read, and you can see video of these presentations here and here.
= = =An obituary from The Guardian
Thursday May 29 2008, by Andy Haines
Will Howard
The campaigner Will Howard, who has died of prostate cancer aged 56, played an influential role in lobbying for effective policies to address two key challenges confronting humankind - nuclear weapons and climate change.
Born in Cambridge, he dropped out of school at 16 but went on to Newcastle University, where he took both a BSc and a PhD in soil science. In the early 1980s, he became the national fundraising strategy coordinator for CND, and in September 1984 played a leading role in founding the Nuclear Freeze initiative in the UK, which advocated a halt to the testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons around the world.
Largely as a result of Will's powers of persuasion, the proposal in 1985 attracted support from a wide range of prominent individuals, including George Harrison, Lenny Henry, Germaine Greer, Denis Healey and David Steel. An opinion poll in 1986 suggested there was more than 70% public support for the proposition. Nuclear Freeze subsequently transformed itself into Saferworld, an independent non-governmental organisation that works to prevent armed violence and create safer communities.
Will then spent 10 years running an IT and new media business on the Gower peninsula, but four years ago he was diagnosed with advanced prostatic cancer and told he had only months to live. Galvanised into another period of intense activity, he helped to found and coordinate the Cap and Share initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also developed practical tools such as the carbon gym, a calculator to encourage people to reduce personal carbon dioxide emissions.
Last year, although seriously ill, he completed a 500-mile journey from Wales to Brussels on a prototype electric folding bicycle to lobby the EU for Cap and Share. During the journey, he sustained a fractured knuckle when he was pushed off the road by a truck in Slough, but after a night in hospital, he determined to press on.
Will was supported by his wife Lyn, whom he met through the Nuclear Freeze initiative, and his sons Sam and Doug. He lived simply, according to his principles, and touched the lives of many with his courage, vision and pragmatism.
= = =An obituary from the Feasta website:
Will Howard (1951-2008)
Will was born in Cambridge on 14th December 1951. His father, Dr Harold Howard, was Deputy Director at the Plant Breeding Institute there, and bred potatoes to be resilient to various insects. The story goes that he was working on two varieties of potatoes and came home and asked his family for names. The first part of the name for each potato had to be "Maris" because that was the name of the road the Institute was on. Will said, "Why don't you call one 'Piper', the Scots would like that". The name had to go through the Scottish board first, and they did like it and the name stuck. The potato of course was Maris Piper. The other potato was Maris Peer. Maris Piper is probably one of the most widely used potatoes we have now.
Will was a very keen bird watcher who, disillusioned with school and family life, would forge letters from his parents to claim sickness, go off bird watching and then shin up drainpipes to get back into the family home. His lifelong friend Rob Jarman remembers them sleeping everywhere, from barns to bus shelters on their adventures to bird watch. These two and two others then took an old Dormobile van out to places you would have a job to travel through easily now, including Iran, Afghanistan, Punjab Pass, and so much more. He would send news of his travels home to his old grandmother, who tracked his progress on a map. His last letter was sent back to Will as she had died.
He became involved with Friends of the Earth after becoming angry at picking up dead birds covered in oil off a Cornish beach after the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967.
While working on a pig farm at the age of 23 he wondered what on earth he was doing with his life, and sat three A levels in six months using the local library to study. He passed them and went to Newcastle upon Tyne University to study soil science. There he got his BSc and PhD in peat soils. Much later, this led to his becoming very interested in biochar and he wished he had continued in soil science so he could have furthered the biochar route now. "But that was Will all over. He wanted to do everything" his wife, Lyn says.
At university he became very involved in student politics. He became a card-carrying Communist, much to his father's annoyance, and read many books, including Marx and Gramsci.
But campaigning was always the area he felt most at home in and was best at. Whilst still at university he would work at CND in London at the weekends, sleeping on the floor over night, then travelling back to Newcastle for lectures. So, on leaving university, he went to work for CND full-time. He became its chief fundraiser at the height of the Cold War. He organised rallies such as that on 11 October 1981 when 2 million people marched through London, but the media did not report what was going on to the extent they did later for the Iraq march.
CND decided not to campaign for a freeze policy that would call on both superpowers to stop producing any more nuclear weapons as a first step to disarmament by just three votes. Unable to cope with the CND unilateral policy any longer he was head hunted to be the National Co-ordinator of a new campaign called FREEZE based in Bristol. Will always worked extremely hard at whatever campaign he was involved with, and threw himself into FREEZE with the same vigour as he had for CND.
There he met his wife Lyn, whom he spent the next 24 years with until his death. They had two sons - Sam now 18 and Doug 16. She came to work for FREEZE and brought her experience of administration and secretarial work to help them. FREEZE had cross-party support - from four political parties in those days. It had some 200 eminent patrons supporting it. An American campaign which preceded it had more support than the civil rights movement.
In 1989, Will left to run his own company on the Gower, South Wales, intended to generate enough money to become a publishing house for campaigning ideas. This proved to be very hard, but Will succeeded and opened a self-built studio with 16 full time staff and a turnover of a million a year, doing various printing and media contracts. Ahead of the game as always, he tried to sell people the internet and the idea of having a web site long before it all took off.
He worked tirelessly on an eco-village project in Shropshire that never came to be as the project was in the wrong hands. He was very involved with Fair Trade in Machynlleth, which achieved its Fair Trade Valley status in 2004. He worked on projects for Centre for Alternative Technology including a carbon calculator with a lot of fun called The Carbon Gym, putting it all together in five weeks. He also worked for the University of Wales on the Visual Culture of Wales project, involving a pictorial history of Wales.
Very interested in psychology, he worked with Lyn on many ideas and texts. These were being edited for publication at his time of death.
He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in June 2004. This could have been picked up 10 years before if only the NHS had had early screening. He was very brave and refused to despair. On coming out of the Feasta meeting in Machynlleth in September 2006 he was convinced that Cap and Share was the only way to go to combat climate change. He worked on it tirelessly to the end of his life. Also very interested in carbon capturing and biochar, he felt the two needed to be undertaken and so proposed the Climate Threads idea under which various ideas would come together to combat climate change.
Lyn Howard writes: "Everyone who met him, whether for a day, or for decades, all kept coming up with the same analysis of him. He was so enthusiastic, inspirational, encouraging, good natured, and loved this life. All he ever wanted to do was to do some good before he went, when ever that was. Those that loved him feel that huge hole left that was Will, that driving engine full of hope, political knowledge and diplomacy. I wanted to save him. This memorial lecture in his name is doing just that."
= = =A tribute by Brian Davey:
Will had his own way of learning that he had a terminal illness - he wasn't going to give up. He was going to fight it. He was going to live as long as he could because he had campaigning to do. He continued fighting his illness so that he could keep campaigning right to the last. The last time I spoke to him he told me that the chemotherapy had not gone well - and then he asked me in a weak voice whether there were any urgent decisions to be made in our Cap and Share work.
Most of us involved in the Cap and Share and climate work in the UK and Ireland only knew Will for a short time. It was far too short. He came to a meeting that we organised in Machynlleth and heard about Cap and Share. It seemed obvious to him and he decided to devote the rest of his life working for it. I knew Will had prostate cancer but then so did my father and he lived many years with it. What I learned later was that Will's cancer was more serious than that - it had spread. That did not deter him because he had campaigning skills that stemmed from his days in the movement for nuclear disarmament and he was going to use them. He flung himself into organising.
Then the blow hit him - Cap and Share seemed obvious but even some of the circle associated with Feasta had alternative approaches. What was more the climate policy agenda was a crowded field - there were lots of ideas jostling for attention and Cap and Share was one more idea among many. It was an idea that was coming late to this field and Cap and Share could barely get a hearing. This was a set back. But Will was a fighter - the challenge was bigger than he thought but he flung himself at it nevertheless. He was working on that problem till right to the end - his Climate Threads approach is a way of packaging Cap and Share with a set of other policies and responses at the cutting edge of thinking about climate responses.
Having a terminal illness is worse for your family he said to us. As far as he was concerned he was still alive and so the way to live was to get on with life as and when he could. He got on a small electric bike and rode to Brussels from Wales, narrowly missing some of the wettest weather ever in this country to go to a conference on emissions trading. It was a media stunt but the media weren't interested - he reflected to me that he ought perhaps to have played the fact that he was dying to them rather more. Once again he just kept on going - demonstrating the saying that "you can't keep a good man down".
It was at this point that I started to work with him more closely. We would spend time on Skype having talks about what needed to be done. He was encouraged, like we all have been, by the developments in Ireland where, with the Green Party in government, Cap and Share is being considered seriously as a policy option. Using the increased credibility that this would give to Cap and Share was a major part of our discussions.
Will lived long enough to see us start to make headway - he secured the UK Cap and Share campaign funding and we met in Bristol to establish a Cap and Share campaigning organisation. He met again at Schumacher College and shortly afterwards he set up meetings in London, at Portcullis House, to try to get the Cap and Share idea deeper into the political process. I was with him at that time. He had just come from an appointment with his oncologist and the message was not good. He had been feeling better but the clinicial message was that the cancer was resurgent. Rather than letting it get him down he was immediately back into lobbying.
This was another battle for Will. The chemotherapy would be awful but afterwards there was the hope that he would bounce back and could keep on campaigning.
Will knew how serious things are for life on the planet. He drew David Wasdell and the latest climate science into our discussions - about how amplifying feedbacks in the climate system are being triggered that could bring about the sixth major extinction event. About how we only have a perilously narrow window of opportunity to do something about this. At each stage, as things kept looking worse for him, at each set back as it became clearer that the challenges were greater than he had realised, he just kept at it.
It is our job now to do the same so that his work will not be in vain.