Lucy Lawless
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 7 » Lucy LawlessNew Zealand’s own Warrior Princess once played Greenpeace head Bunny McDiarmid in the Rainbow Warrior tele-movie. Now, the eco-warrior is backing a Greenpeace campaign on climate change. Lucy Lawless spoke to Good soon after her return to New Zealand, after nine years in LA
I was about 13 years old when they started bringing up the spectre of global warming. Thirty years later, there are still people who find comfort in denial. But it’s going to be a cold comfort.
There’s no time to waste. We can’t put our heads in the sand and say global warming’s not real. There’s no time for all that. The bloody ice caps are melting!
Let’s not mess around anymore. Let’s roll our sleeves up.
Evolve or die. We’ll go the way of the dinosaurs. It’s so funny that dinosaurs became fossil fuels, which threaten to make us extinct. Can you see any parallels?
It’s not even our grandchildren who are going to be boned, it’s our kids. In 40 years my kids could be frazzled by terrible skin cancers.
We’ve got to joyfully go about the business of setting things to rights, for our kids’ sake.
There’s a moral fix for what ails the planet. Every single one of us can do something.
It’s better to fight for it now, because the pain of change is not nearly as bad as the pain of staying the same.
My husband and I fight about heating the pool. Every single family has these questions about how you will take personal responsibility for the planet and where your limits are. You can’t do everything. You’re only human.
You can get compassion fatigue, so you’ve got to set limits—but I’m not there yet on global warming. And Starship remains a huge priority in my life.
I sensed a lot of pain and fear in America. Obama’s inherited such a monstrous snowball of problems.
Part of my not becoming an American citizen was because I was not a fan of the Bush administration. I wish I had now though, because then I could have voted. That was foolish of me. I’m certainly going to vote now.
It’s better here. Our children are flourishing in New Zealand. I’m working with my husband and we’re doing work that we’re proud of. My husband is American, but he’s as Kiwi as anyone I know.
We’ve gotten rid of a house, and a pool, and several cars in the US, and I’m driving a Prius. Our next project is solar heating for the pool, because it’s driving me crazy.
We have two beehives, because we want to help the bee populations. This guy takes care of them, we found him online, all you do is supply the land. You’ll get more honey than you could possibly eat.
We’re planting native flowers and trees all over our property. We’ve got compost going. I rescued a whole lot of punga logs, and we’ve built weta and skink habitats. My husband and son are natural gardeners. I’m learning. I don’t mind making my home a weta wonderland.
You don’t need much space to do these things. I went to a one-acre farm in Costa Rica where they had two cows, and ran their kitchen off the methane. One of my boys, that’s his plan. He wants to be a farmer.
When I was a kid, post-Cold War, there was still the threat of nuclear war. I remember feeling despair as a child, this feeling of impending doom. I don’t like to put these worries on my kids. I want them to have a full childhood so they’re not burdened with a feeling of nihilism.
I remember a gasoline company that posted a $6 billion profit in the wake of the first Iraq War. I thought, What are you going to do with that, buy a new planet? There’s no planet B.
My biological job is done. If something happened to me tomorrow my kids could survive. But I want to make sure they have a habitat to survive in. We don’t want to say that we weren’t part of the solution.
I think we can do this, we really can.
