In the late 1990s, the social scientist and author Mayer Hillman predicted that, in the future, our children and grandchildren would ask us what we did to prevent global climate catastrophe. Twenty years later Greta Thunberg, addressing the UN, thundered: “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal.
The eyes of all future generations are upon you.” Twenty-five years ago, Hillman also warned that public denial of the climate crisis would only begin to crack when people in the global north were personally affected – by the creation of millions of environmental refugees from uninhabitable parts of the world, for instance, or after their homes had been flooded several times over and they could no longer insure them. Hillman, who has died aged 94, not only anticipated social and environmental problems decades in advance of most other people, he also came up with solutions that seemed outlandish at the time but are now considered unremarkable. In 1984 he proposed energy audits and thermal ratings for buildings; in 2007 EPCs (energy performance certificates) were rolled out across England and Wales.
In the early 90s, he suggested that road intersections should be raised to pavement level to give priority to pedestrians, a now commonplace practice. Cycle lanes and 20mph speed limits – Hillman was advocating these more than 40 years ago. Increasingly, his energies were taken up with the climate crisis.
His 2004 book, How We Can Save the Planet, described it as “the most serious environmental threat that the world has ever faced”. He dismissed individual gestures as futile, even though he had not flown for decades. In an analogy with the consensus around wartime rationing, he proposed carbon rationing as the only way to prevent serious damage, foreseeing a time when people would pity someone passing in a car – a sign of an emergency requiring them to use up a precious part of their annual carbon quota.
Soon, though, he came to believe that it was too late to save the planet, any lame protest about human beings’ need for hope airily brushed aside, as though if Hillman himself could tolerate its absence, so too would most people. Born in West Hampstead, north London, to Scottish Jewish parents, Mayer (known as Mickey by family and many friends), was the youngest of three boys. His father, David, an orthodox Jew who fled the pogroms in Lithuania to settle in Glasgow, was a portrait painter and stained-glass artist; his mother, Annie, a GP.
At the outbreak of the second world war, Mickey and his brothers, Ellis and Harold, were evacuated to homes in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. His gentile hosts offered him meat and fish, which, coming from a kosher home, he politely declined; Hillman was vegetarian thereafter. All three boys would come home for the Sabbath, leaving school early on Fridays to take the train to Finchley Road station.
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