Nader has spent his career motivating people to take action, setting up public-interest research groups in universities across Canada. But it's a lonely life. From his earliest venture as a consumer advocate against the automobile industry, the lawyer has been subjected to intense scrutiny for any signs of vulnerability. I had met Nader while I was in Washington to film for The Nature of Things; I decided to drop in and meet him as a hero of mine. He greeted me warmly and was clearly informed about issues in Canada. His office was cluttered, books and articles heaped in piles. As we strolled through the room, he loaded me up with books, pamphlets, and articles. He really believes in empowering people with information.
Before he arrived in Vancouver for his speech, his office had called and said he would like to have dinner with me. When I asked what kind of food he liked, I was told he had no great preference but that since he is of Lebanese origin, Middle Eastern would be good. So Lebanese it was. Tara and Severn went along with me, and Ralph was accompanied by an associate and a nephew who lived in Vancouver. It was a lively and stimulating evening with lots of animated discussion.
Ralph is a very serious and intense person. This became obvious when a belly dancer appeared and began clicking her castanets, throwing her scarf around the necks of diners, and pulling them to their feet or their heads to her bosom. My jaw dropped as I watched. Ralph didn't even look her way and kept on talking. Finally she came over to our table, enticing a couple of people to get up to wiggle for a few seconds on the floor before stuffing some bills into her bra. Ralph never looked up but kept right on talking. The dancer eventually left without ever engaging him.
At the end of the meal, as we got up to leave, Ralph made no mention of the belly dancer but simply said: “That was a very nice meal. And no one overate.”
WHEN I TAKE A trip — and especially before I used e-mail — faxes and mail pile up very quickly. So I have the mail separated into folders marked Urgent, Speaking Requests, First Class, Second Class, and Bumf. This system provides me with a way of responding first to the most pressing messages and working toward material to glance at and then file or discard.
In 1990, I arrived home from a couple of weeks away to find a stack of mail that Shirley Macaulay, my secretary, had left on my porch at home. Even though it was quite late at night and I was tired, I couldn't resist taking the top two folders, which were quite thick, to bed, and I began to sift through them. Shirley usually flagged with a little tab letters she thought were especially urgent, interesting, or important.
When I got to a handwritten letter of several pages with no tab, I figured it would be a struggle, because handwritten notes are so much harder to read and this was a long one. But the script was beautiful and easily read, so I started and was soon drawn into the content, which was the writer's response to a speech I had given a few months earlier. When I got to the thirteenth and last page, it was signed “Charles.” I thought, “Charles who?” I looked back at the letterhead on the front page, and it said Windsor Castle. It was from Prince Charles! I thought it must be an elaborate joke, but it wasn't. I've never discussed this letter in public before. It was the real thing, and this is how it came to be.
In January 1990, I gave a speech to the Food Marketing Institute in Honolulu, and apparently a transcript of my remarks was sent to Prince Charles. Not only did he read it, he sent me a detailed response in the handwritten letter. Unfortunately, when I asked his office for permission to reprint the letter, I was refused permission to quote even a sentence. But I can give the gist of what he said.
Prince Charles was especially struck by my use of the metaphor of the “boiled frog syndrome.” According to psychologist Robert Ornstein, frogs that live in an aqueous environment have thermal receptors, sensory organs that detect large changes in temperature but not small, incremental shifts. According to Ornstein, if a frog is placed in a pot of hot water, it will immediately hop out. But if it is put in cold water and heat is slowly applied to the pot, the frog will eventually boil to death without ever registering the temperature change. The relevance of that frog as a metaphor to humans, who cannot sense thinning ozone, rising atmospheric temperature, background radiation, or toxic chemicals, is obvious.
Not only did His Royal Highness consider my analysis brilliant (his word, honest), he agreed with me about the gravity of the crisis, the destructive demand of conventional economics for endless growth, and the unwarranted optimism that technological innovation will get us out of any difficulty generated by our activities. He described his own experiences of the way people in developing countries are lured away from their traditional values by advertisements and our dazzling lifestyle.
Prince Charles told me that he and the BBC were discussing the possibility of his hosting a program on the environment. He was under enormous pressure to tone down his remarks, however, even though he felt there was a need for the kind of strong statements I had made in my speech. He ended by telling me that he would send copies of my speech to businesspeople and other influential folk, and he asked me to let him know if I was ever in his neck of the woods.
Now, like many people, I had read stories in the popular press portraying an eccentric king-in-waiting who was reputed to talk to plants and have weird ideas about architecture, but this was an unusually thoughtful letter. And since he had responded so generously to my ideas, of course I knew he must be brilliant. My parents-in-law are English, so I figured I would win a lot of brownie points with them when I showed them the letter. And I was right — they were most excited.
Because the letter had ended with an invitation to drop in, Tara and I decided we would take a trip to England built around a visit to Prince Charles. He had given a number to call, so the next day I called it, and I reached his personal secretary. I suggested a number of days when I could visit, and he promised he would check the prince's calendar and get back to me, which he did within a couple of days. We were scheduled for a half hour at Highgrove, the prince's summer place, which was near Tara's birthplace in Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire.
Soon we had booked a plane and made our summer plans around our English visit, only to read a few weeks later that the prince had fallen off a horse while playing polo and broken his arm. I figured our visit would be off, so I called his secretary, telling him I had heard the prince was cancelling appointments. “Yes, he is,” the secretary confirmed, “but not the appointments he wants to keep, and yours is still on his calendar.”
Tara and I flew to England and after dropping our children off with relatives in Wotton-under-Edge went to Highgrove, where we were ushered into a large room whose walls were covered with pictures. I recognized the famous portrait of George iii, the mad king thought to have suffered from porphyria, a hereditary disease; under his reign, the United States had broken away. Sitting on some of the tables were numerous family photos of the prince's siblings, children, and friends, but not one of Diana. We waited for several minutes — long enough to have a good look around without being snoopy. The apparent lack of security was quite stunning, although I'm sure today things are different. When we arrived at Highgrove, I had simply called out my name at the front gate, and we were let right in, then left alone in the room.
Finally Prince Charles walked in with his arm in a sling and greeted us warmly, making a self-deprecating remark about his clumsiness while playing. He is so familiar and famous, yet so personable and relaxed. He's only a human being, but he has been bred for this kind of rarefied life and exudes that in the way he carries himself. We had been briefed about what not to do — for example, refer to the Queen as “your mother” or call him Charles. I was impressed by how trim he was — not a hint of fat around his waist, yet think of all those fancy dinners he attends.