"FIFTY, SIXTY years from now, we will look back on this day and age the way people today look at the Middle Ages," says Ute Bellion, the newly-elected Chairperson of Greenpeace International.

"We'll wonder how people could live with all this waste and pollution. Horrible, horrible, stinking! And we'll wonder why we allowed this to happen when we'd known about sewage systems since the days of the old Romans. We'll wonder why we degenerated so far into these people with our belching cars and our toxic pollution and our nuclear waste.

"What people in the future will not believe is that while all this was going on we actually knew about the damage we were doing to our climate and our breathing systems and our children. It'll all seem very silly, very, very stupid!"

Ute Bellion is an optimist. But then, optimism is the plasma of environmentalism. If Greenpeace, and other groups like it, weren't able to see some glimpse of light through the smog they'd have thrown their biodegradable hats at it years ago. The sheer magnitude of the problem with which they're trying to grapple is immense.

Every day that goes by, it just gets worse. And the added twist in the nineties is that not only are politicians everywhere cynically reneging on their environmental responsibilities but they're cynically reneging on them behind a smokescreen of Greenspeak platitudes.

"It's easy to get despondent," concedes Bellion. "Especially, when you see how much lip service governments pay to the environment and how little they do. Industrial and chemical companies have also gotten very smart. What they have done is improved their image but not necessarily their actions. They have great advertisements in the papers about how environmentally-sound they are and so on. It looks good but the reality is only marginally better than before.

"Things are getting so bad that this makes some people just switch off when they hear the word 'environment'. It's not just a local pollution problem, you're talking about a global situation. You're talking about a countdown here.

"That's what happens when something gets really serious, people turn away because it's just too bad to listen to every day. I can fully understand that. But just because people are tired of hearing about something doesn't mean that it's getting any better."

convenient dustbin

Bellion herself first joined Greenpeace in her native Germany almost eight years ago. A waste water engineer by profession, she became disillusioned very early in her career as a "facilitator of pollution" who was expected merely to serve and never question why. "We were trained only to look at one end of a pipeline, not what came out of it," she says.

Greenpeace appealed to Bellion because it was "international, non-violent and committed to direct action." With her particular expertise, she eventually became Co-ordinator of the European Rivers Campaign and became intimately familiar with every stretch of polluted waterway in the continent. In her current position, she has at her fingertips information about not only how bad things are but just how bad they are and, of course, the identities of the chief culprits.

Belgium, she says, is a particular black spot, but so too are Spain, Greece, South America, Northern Asia. Basically, you could just stick a few pins in an atlas and come up with an environmental shitlist of your own. Bellion who was in this country to help launch Irish Greenpeace's recent "Legal Pollution Is Not The Solution" campaign is especially worried about our own not-so-green and pleasant land.

"Ireland is a small country yet it's the fifteenth largest chemical exporter in the world," she point out. "That's not because chemical companies love Ireland or care about employment here, it's because they find it convenient and cheap for their operations."

Bellion believes that, right now, Ireland is at an environmental crossroads, and is in serious danger of replicating the mistakes of so many other European countries. "Ireland will have to make a decision about where Ireland wants to be in the longer term," she avers. "Do you want to be a location for the world's chemical industry, do you want to sacrifice the reputation which you still have for being a relatively environmentally friendly country, do you want to risk all that for the sake of some short-lived, out-dated chemical industry? It's gone in 2020, so Ireland should refuse to become a dustbin for Europe's industry and concentrate on clean industry and clean production.

"Ireland should look at things like insurance company investment. These companies are increasingly looking at investing in clean energy. If they don't the damages they'll have to pay out due to global warming, flooding, storms and so on will be very high. Insurance companies have realised this and are prepared to invest in alternatives.

"With the right pressure, Ireland could also get the EC to put some money into keeping the country clean. Otherwise, they'll just continue to invest in Irish roads and transport systems which are really only there to make you more attractive to chemical industries and so on. If Irish governments don't look at this kind of thing now, you'll end up just like the rest of Europe, swimming in pollution."

Of course, the real environmental nightmare is unfolding over in Eastern Europe. "It's a mess," Bellion sighs. "We have Greenpeace offices in Russia, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic and outposts in Slovakia and Bratislava but it's very hard for our people to work there. Doing anything about the environment is almost impossible.

"For example, governments out there would love to shut down their nuclear power stations tomorrow. They hate them, they fear another Chernobyl. But it gets very cold there in the winter. They need energy because their houses are so inefficient and their heating is so inefficient. So, somebody has to come in there and offer funding for alternative energies, we are trying to facilitate that. But, meanwhile, Eastern Europe has already become a dumping ground for the West.

"There's no legislation, no controls. You have waste companies from wonderful, clean Germany bringing their stuff to Romania for so-called recycling but it's not being recycled, it's just being dumped. They just see Eastern Europe as a convenient dustbin."

next phase

Greenpeace are fighting back, however. They are forging strong links with emerging East European governments, offering expertise and advise where they can, and pushing for tighter legislation at the E.C. end. They are also taking more practical steps.

CFC gases destroy the ozone layer, this is clear," says Bellion. "But the CFC industry have always said that they could not produce CFC-free cooling and everybody needs a fridge. We said 'okay, if you don't do it, we'll do it'. We went to a company in East Germany that was on the verge of bankruptcy and financed them to develop a CFC-free fridge, using protane and butane. It's just off the conveyor belt now and is selling all over Germany and beyond.

"The Chinese are also very interested. There's scope for lots more products like that, products that will provide long-term jobs too. The E.C. and others are slowly facing up to this."

Bellion's unquenchable optimism comes to the fore again. "The environmental movement is not that old," she asserts. "We only started off in the seventies. Then, our work mainly concentrated on raising awareness, drawing attention to dumping at sea, the killing of whales and so on. Then when people became aware we had to change attitude.

"In '85, we started our political wing and began to gain observer status at U.N. conventions and so on. That was good but it wasn't enough. Now, we have nice paper work, nice commitments from government, nice Agenda 21 from the Rio Conference - the thing is to put it all into action. Our next phase will be keeping a watch on governments and companies and making sure they live up to their nice words. If they don't, we'll highlight it and ruin their nice public relations image.

"When you see it like that, you can see environmentalism as something that's developing and achieving as it grows. That's what keeps us going."

And Ute Bellion's advice to any other congenital optimists out there?

"Don't give up, don't think that you're on your own, join up," she enthuses. "Join Greenpeace, join another group, I don't care what. But don't convince yourself that you don't count. You are a citizen of this country. You are a voter. You have influence.

"There's only so much you can do as an individual, as an individual consumer, but if you can get together with others you can change the world."