Magazine

Resourceful campaigner

Friends of the Earth Europe, part of the world’s largest environmental network, represents 31 national organisations and thousands of local groups at European level. Libby Peake caught up with its Resource Use Campaigner, Ariadna Rodrigo

This article was taken from Issue 80

This year’s highest new entrant to our Hot 100 list, Ariadna Rodrigo, clearly has a lot of fans out there. Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe’s Resource Use Campaigner (in effect, “a team of one person”, she tells me) was described with many a laudatory adjective by those who voted for her: ‘great’ cropped up more than a few times, as did ‘awesome’, ‘amazing’, and ‘important’, while ‘critical’, ‘radical’, and ‘tireless’ also had a few mentions, and, probably most appropriately, one commenter said she was ‘extremely resourceful’. Keen to find out more about the campaigner to whom such words could be so freely attached, I caught up with Rodrigo at a critical time for Europe’s resource agenda: the previous European Commission’s Circular Economy Package had just been dropped, with dubious promises to bring in something ‘more ambitious’.