Bonnie Wright Joins “Marie Claire” UK as Guest Editor for Earth Month
Harry Potter actor and environmental activist Bonnie Wright has joined forces with Marie Claire UK as a guest editor for April in celebration of Earth Month, a month that prioritizes “planet over profit.”
Bonnie is more recently known within the activism community for her newly released book, Go Gently, which she is also currently filming a TV show for alongside fellow environmentalist Pattie Gonia.
Bonnie’s first Marie Claire UK feature covers all things sustainability, discussing where her passion for activism and sustainability began and her time spent on a Greenpeace ship.
My interest in sustainability specifically – and becoming more aware of my environment – came about as a direct result of my upbringing. While I grew up in London, I spent a lot of my childhood on the south coast of England in East Sussex, where my parents have a cottage. Over time, I began to notice that more and more rubbish was ending up on this special beach I loved. I suppose I felt curious as to what was happening and why, which sparked an interest in trying to understand the system of waste.
This led Wright to begin researching “single-use plastics, pollution and how we can – in our own individual ways – mitigate and limit our use of plastics.”
Peeling back those layers meant facing my own behavioural patterns, too – particularly around the convenience of using plastics – and prompted me to think about how quick I was to buy something without stopping to think about where it came from, or what the repercussions really were.
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Something that Bonnie describes as a “major turning point” was her time spent on a Greenpeace ship – the Arctic Sunrise. The month-long trip took place in 2017, and Wright and a group of campaigners joined for a couple of days. Their time there included trawling for microplastics, where a small, 10 cm fishing net was lowered into the water and dragged for an hour before being pulled up.
There wasn’t one instance that the tiny, 10cm [sic] fishing net didn’t bring up some type of plastic.
Physically seeing that first-hand [sic] really helped make those far-off statistics feel very real. It was a big moment personally, both in terms of the individual changes I pledged to make at home but also the commitment to advocating for this issue and using the platform I already had – thanks to Harry Potter – to talk about it. It really consumed me, and I came home from the trip thinking, ‘This needs to be my life.’
It was this that inspired her book, Go Gently, which provides readers with small but actionable steps and tips on how we at home can make a difference to the planet within our everyday lives.
We are, as always, truly inspired by Bonnie’s environmental activism and look forward to reading more of her guest editor articles for Marie Claire UK’s celebration of Earth Month, which include sustainable living, how to thrift, and more.
