It doesn’t matter what it is you choose to do, it’s about doing something. Oh, yes, take massive action if you can, but if you can’t take massive action, take some minute action, just take some action.

Hallo, respected viewers, and welcome to today’s Good People, Good Works featuring British journalist and environmentalist Chantal Cooke, who in 2002 co-founded Passion for the Planet, a UK-based radio station that is dedicated to helping listeners pursue greener, healthier, and more fulfilling lifestyles. The London Leaders program brings together leading civic figures of diverse backgrounds to advise the Mayor of London, England on various important issues concerning the city.

In 2009 Chantal Cooke was appointed a London Leader in Sustainability due to her experience in promoting green living. As a result of her participation in the program, Ms. Cooke was inspired to launch the “Munch Less Meat” initiative, which encourages Londoners to adopt a sustainable diet by consuming less or no meat.

For her vigorous efforts to preserve and protect the planet, Ms. Cooke has received many awards, including the Triodos Women in Ethical Business Award, the Green Business Award and the British Environment and Media Award. Ms. Cooke now shares how she first became interested in environmental issues.

I think it’s one of those things I feel has always been with me. But of course, if I had to look back I’d say I was very lucky that my grandparents, in particular, were very into nature and plants and things like that. They were one of the first people to bring certain cacti and succulents into this country.

So they had this massive cacti and succulent collection. So I was always out in the garden and fiddling around with the plants. There was always this thing about being out in the garden and looking at the plants and those sorts of things.

As a young child, in addition to her interest in plants and the environment, Ms. Cooke also truly loved animals and even published a magazine about them.

And when I was about eight years old, I wrote to a magazine called “Animal Press,” and I traced lots of picture of animals and did little quizzes and all that kind of stuff you do when you’re eight years old. And one of the teachers at school was fantastic. And she, I think xeroxed it. I sold it around the school for something like ten pence a copy. I think I made the sum total of £1.20, which I have to say, in those days, was a bit more than it is today.

So I sold these copies of the magazine and then I sent the money off to charity. And they wrote back and obviously were very grateful and made me an honorary lifetime member. And of course you can imagine as an eight year old I was “an honorary member.” It was just so exciting.

As a young adult Ms. Cooke began working for several UK radio stations in various capacities.

My background really has been as a journalist but predominantly focused on radio. My actual first job in radio was making radio commercials for movies, which was, as you can imagine straight out of university, actually really quite exciting. So I got to meet some really interesting people. So it was a good grounding.

I think in lots of ways the grounding in commercials was, the most useful bit, because when you have to produce a commercial, you have to make it very short. You need to get that information across like that really quickly and it has to stick. And actually if you can use those same kinds of principles for all sorts of information, even when you’ve got more than 30 seconds, I think that’s a really good discipline to have.

From there I moved to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and then that was really good because it was a lot of grounding and producing speech radio and so on. It’s a 24-hour speech station, so that was hard work, But it was really good fun.

After leaving the BBC, Ms. Cooke broadened her experience by working on other radio related projects. She then made the courageous decision to launch her own station.

And at the time this was the very early days of DAB radio. And what that did was give an opportunity to have more niche-focused stations in a way that the bandwidth available on FM just couldn’t allow to happen.

And DAB is?

Digital Air Broadcasting is what it stands for. And it’s what’s replacing FM in the UK. And the benefits are there’s a lot more bandwidth available, so it actually means there’s an opportunity for stations like “Passion for the Planet” which has a more kind of focused audience.

We’ll continue our lively discussion with Chantal Cooke after these brief messages. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

So I think it's about thinking and remembering that as individuals we do have quite a lot of power. I mean, we are consumers. We consume a massive amount. Just think, if you took even 10% of the money that you use to consume and shifted it, what a phenomenal difference that would make!

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works as we continue our interview with Chantal Cooke, journalist, environmentalist and co-founder of the radio station Passion for the Planet. From her many years of working in the radio industry, Ms. Cooke has realized that radio can be a powerful medium for informing people about environmental issues.

What radio can do is you put it on the background and you’re listening, and then there’ll be a little thing about wildlife and you’ll go, "Oh, that’s interesting.” And then maybe a little bit later you hear something else and go, "Oh, I didn’t know that, really?" Actually you’ve just learned something, and if the radio station is doing its job properly, hopefully you’re inspired to go, “Oh I could do that. That would be kind of interesting,” and so on in whatever area it happens to be. It doesn’t have to be wildlife, obviously.

So that, for me, is the power of radio. Radio is not great at giving you everything you need to know on a subject, but it is really good at opening up new ideas and opening doors, if you like, in the brain. So that’s why I love radio.

Ms. Cooke's experience in radio advertising showed her the importance of getting a message across quickly but effectively. As a result, Passion for the Planet has adopted a unique approach to programming.

So, on Passion, nothing is longer than five minutes, ever. It’s a quick five minutes and a few facts about something, and there’ll be some great music afterwards or there’ll be something else to listen to. So I think it is about making it accessible like that.

Passion for the Planet offers a wide variety of programming to its audience. In addition to hearing music from around the world, the short informational shows offered are diverse in nature.

Basically, we have a number of key areas we focus on, so obviously, anything to do with the environment. So I would class that as whether it’s to do with climate change, waste and recycling and things, wildlife, conservation, nature, farming, and anything that basically affects our environment.

Another area is health. So that’ll be both orthodox and complementary medicine. It could be physical and mental health and spiritual health as well, because that’s all part of human beings. So that’s the health side of it. And then, attached to that, but slightly different, is personal and business development.

And we do both because a lot of our audiences are people who want to take responsibility for the future of their lives. So they perhaps run their own business or they aspire to run their own business, or perhaps they have a small business on the side of what they do, which is where their real passion lies.

So if we can give them information to help them build those businesses and help them, build themselves as a person, or improve what they’re able to achieve in their lives then I think that’s really important. So it’s basically personal business development, health and environmental issues, and those are the key areas. And we mix it in with music as well.

Since Kenny Stevens and yourself founded Passion for the Planet, can you tell us any touching feedback, that you’ve had from your audience?

I think very early on we did get an email from a lady who’d heard one of the interviews, and she was actually quite ill. And she’d heard this interview and it was sort of a treatment that could possibly help her. It was a sort of a form of exercise and so on. And she’d gone off, tried it out and it had actually really, really helped her health.

So I think those stories are really amazing, when you hear something where, you’ve given them that piece of information, they’ve gone off and researched it further, because as I said we’re not the font of all knowledge, and then actually it has made a difference. And she wouldn’t have known about that otherwise.

And then the other one is where people just go, “Oh I didn’t realize I could do so and so, I’ve just started doing it actually; it’s really easy, isn’t it?” And so on. And that sort of thing as well, I really enjoy.

Many thanks to Chantal Cooke for her inspiring passion to conserve and safeguard our planet and providing constructive radio and television programming that is a vehicle for growth and learning. Please join us again next Sunday on Good People, Good Works, for the concluding episode of our interview with this green leader.

For more details on Passion for the Planet, please visit
www.PassionforthePlanet.com
Information on the Munch Less Meat project is available at MunchLessMeat.co.uk

Thank you, precious viewers, for your presence today on our program. Up next is The World Around Us, after Noteworthy News. May we all be blessed with lives forever filled with inner tranquility and grace.

Elisabeth Berger is a vegetarian Austrian telepathic animal communicator who has learned much from her noble canine companion, Wuno. What are some of Wuno’s heartfelt messages for humanity?

It’s essential for us to be a part of the family. We’re animals and will always remain so, but we’re also a part of you.

Meet the vibrant Ms. Berger and Wuno in a two-part series airing Friday and Saturday, July 16 and 17, on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.