I was born in Britain in 1942. My earliest memories are about flowers, of walking through grass so high it was over my head and I was trying to keep up with the big legs, of small animals, ducks and water. Between these memories full of joy and wonderment there are memories of fire, sirens and bombs. When I was a little older and the beaches were open, my great joy was to creep along the breakwaters and look at crabs and other things that lived below water. All my childhood homes were filled with my jars of fish, tadpoles, silkworms and as many other creatures my long-suffering mother could cope with. When I was ten, the rock-pools on the wave cut platform at Avoca Beach north of Sydney, Australia were like aquaria; full of striped fish and other wonderful plants and animals – they are no longer like this, when I was thirteen and bought my first mask and snorkel in Adelaide, my mother was terrified I was going to be eaten by a shark as I swam over the “blue line” of sea grass in waist deep water – this is now several kilometres off shore.

I look around with joy at the natural world but back with deep concern about the large environmental changes I have seen in just one lifetime. I look with total horror at what people still do to each other in the name of peace; having been born underneath a war I recognise the full insanity. I have no influence over this so I concentrate on what I can influence in some small way – which is the environment.
My passion has always been trying to understand and preserve the environment that we live in. Helping businesses to understand that improving the environment also improves their bottom line and working with them to achieve this is the logical flow on from this passion. Businesses find that improving their environmental performance also makes very real dollar savings. It is a true win-win.

I started my adult life as a biology teacher, and then took time out to have three children before returning to teaching because it had the right hours and holidays in the days of no childcare. When the kids were old enough to cope with me working strange hours, I returned to University where I did third year science again in the marine subjects that did not exist when I did my first degree. I found the kids were not able to cope with my using a modem to work online on the University Vax computer. The phone being permanently engaged by mum not teenagers caused a major drama. After 6 years of tertiary study in marine biology I worked part time as an environmental consultant but also helped run my family’s computer business. It was here, in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I learned about small business and the pressures it is under as well as getting involved in Quality Assurance when I implemented ISO 9002, or AS 3902 as it was then, for our family business.

One of the roles I had was as Conservation Council’s nominee on the Aquaculture committee. It was here that I first met the tuna farmers and on mass they were very daunting. When I first started work with them, some eight years later I had a fairly difficult job to establish myself as a credible consultant in their industry. There were some funny stories about the guys when I first started – “I thought women were only useful for two things – in the kitchen and the bedroom but you are different”…………….. “It is too rough”, “you will be seasick”, then having to climb from a rubber ducky to a trawler deck in a rough sea to be met by the skipper with a totally bloodied hand outstretched and various other boys games until I became accepted as a useful person who gave good value even if I was a woman.

An industry person has described me as the “greenie that rolled over” and I have been described by some of the green groups as “having gone over to the Dark Side”. If both sides think I am odd, then I have probably hit the middle ground where I want to be.

I want to state clearly that my views on the urgent need to embrace environmental management by the entire community – not just industry, has not changed. I have deep love and awe of the natural world and concern for the decisions my grandchildren and their friends will have to make.

Technorati Tags: ISO 14001, Jean Cannon

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