Писатель-эколог Пол Браун скончался в возрасте 82 лет, написав последнюю колонку о глобальном потеплении из больничной койки

Paul Brown, who has died aged 82, was a pioneering environment correspondent for the Guardian, and wrote on the subject for more than 40 years, continuing long after his retirement from the paper. His last column, published in November 2025, about the growing crisis of global warming, was written from his hospital bed in Luton, where he was being treated for terminal lung cancer, diagnosed only a few weeks earlier. A quiet and gently spoken presence in the newsroom, often with a wry smile, Brown was a calm and unflustered figure and – which is not always the case in frenetic newsrooms – happy to help others, including younger journalists. He had done most jobs in newspapers, having started on local papers before graduating to Fleet Street as a reporter on the Sun in its raucous 1980s heyday. This was not necessarily then a likely or welcoming passport to the Guardian, as many of us recruited from the tabloids discovered on joining the paper. Paul’s professionalism, kindness and charm saw him through. He was born in Uxbridge, west London, during the last year of the second world war, the younger son of Kathleen (nee May), a geography teacher, and her husband, Frederick Brown, who was serving as a squadron leader in the RAF. Educated as a boarder at Churcher’s college, Petersfield, Hampshire, which was at that stage a grammar school (and is now private), he left on his 17th birthday to become a trainee journalist on the East Grinstead Courier. There was an early indication of his resolution when, at the age of 19, he asked his parents’ permission to marry his girlfriend, Maureen McMillan. They refused on the grounds that he was too young and immature to marry and, when Paul appealed to magistrates to overrule their decision, they sided with his parents. Within weeks he got a job on the Lincolnshire Standard, applied immediately for three weeks’ leave of absence and eloped with Maureen to Scotland, where they were married in Galashiels a few weeks after his 20th birthday. The marriage lasted until Maureen’s death in 2018. Paul’s career in local newspapers was lengthier then than might be expected now: two years on the Lincolnshire Standard as docks correspondent and deputy agriculture editor were followed by two further years on the Leicester Mercury, then six years on the Birmingham Post, with a portfolio of specialisms including property correspondent, television reporter and special investigations correspondent. Edging nearer to London, he had seven years on the newsdesk of the Post-Echo in Hemel Hempstead, culminating as news editor. In 1981, after 20 years as a journalist, he joined the Sun as a reporter during the time of its boisterous editor Kelvin MacKenzie. The following year he was recruited as a reporter at the Guardian, where he would spend the next 23 years of his career. Though he started as a generalist, the stories he covered soon gravitated towards the environment, which was just beginning to be regarded as a national and international concern, as scientists started to register alarm at greenhouse gas emissions and their potential impact on the world. Their warnings captured the attention of the former scientist turned prime minister Margaret Thatcher, but it took a while to interest news editors even at the Guardian, as Paul told his successor Fiona Harvey in an interview in 2021: “We were talking about what would happen 50 years away. It needed all our ingenuity to make it sound like a news story, because people find prospects that far into the future boring.” Any enduring newsdesk scepticism was dispelled when a readers’ survey discovered that it was the second most read subject after medical stories. “It certainly made a substantial difference to the editors’ attitude,” he added. An early story in 1983 came from a Greenpeace ship blockading a pipeline at the Sellafield nuclear plant in Cumbria, which was discharging radioactive waste into the sea. Other voyages exposed sewage dumping and pipelines pouring chemical waste into the sea around Britain. These were followed in 1988 by a three month-long trip by Paul to the Antarctic, during which he stayed at a Greenpeace base, sending stories back to the office using a satellite phone. He produced 26 stories during that time, many of which made the front page. The paper, he said, loved being able to use the dateline “Paul Brown in Antarctica”. The following year he was made the paper’s environment correspondent, a post he held until his retirement in 2005. There were huge domestic stories such as the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic in Britain, but the job also took him all over the world. He was arrested by the French Foreign Legion while reporting from the exclusion zone around France’s nuclear testing site at Mururoa in the Pacific, and deported to Tahiti. And he was detained twice by the Iranian authorities while investigating the damage to crops caused by the oil fires in neighbouring Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf war, even though he had been invited to the country by the Iranian government. He also got shot at by the country’s troops, who mistook him for an American. He covered Earth summits in Brazil and South Africa and the first 10 Cop – Conference of the Parties – climate change summits, from Berlin in 1995 to Buenos Aires in 2004. Even after his retirement he worked as a freelance environment journalist and as a tutor for the Guardian Foundation and United Nation institutions around the world, teaching young journalists how to cover the subject. He was a joint editor of the Climate News Network, founded with his colleague and friend Tim Radford and the former BBC journalist Alex Kirby, which ran for seven years from 2013. And he wrote weather and species watch columns for the Guardian until November 2025. His work brought him a year’s fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in 2007 and fellowships of the Royal Geographical Society, the Geologists’ Association and the Royal Society of Arts. Paul wrote a number of books, mainly on environmental issues, some for children, and also histories of Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, where he lived and was for many years chair of the local archaeological and historical society. In October 2025 Paul married his partner Caroline Audemars, a former National Trust press officer. She and a daughter, Clara, from his first marriage, survive him; another daughter, Lucy, died in 2001.