John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor for 27 years, thought his greatest achievement was the Gumbi education fund, set up after he wrote a moving piece in 2002 about how the village of Gumbi in Malawi was recovering from famine, and its children were desperate for an education.
Even though he had not asked them to, Guardian readers started sending money both to John and the paper to build a school and provide a teacher. John, who has died aged 74 of prostate cancer, was genuinely surprised his words were so powerful, always underestimating the impact of his championing of the underdog.
He was a feature writer with an unconventional approach to news. In 1996, having covered the treetop-dwelling protesters trying to prevent the building of the Newbury bypass, he wanted to tell the other side of the story, and hit on the idea of enrolling as a security guard whose job it was to dislodge them. Posing as a French man, and getting a colleague to write him some false references, he spent two weeks in uniform evicting protesters before writing about his experiences.
Perhaps the best glimpse of his character came one morning in the office when tears were running down his cheeks. Asked what was the matter, he said a couple of months before he had been in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and visited the district with the highest death rate for young children. He had met two women and they told him that it was lack of fresh water that was causing infant mortality on a terrible scale. What they needed was a well, but they had no money to build one.
John said he had had the exact money they needed to build the well in his pocket in Guardian expenses, so he had given it to them with the stipulation that they send him an email when it was done. He was in tears because he had just received it: “Our children are no longer dying. Thank you.”
John, who was always famously behind with his expenses, was later that week chased to explain what he had spent in Bangladesh. At a colleague’s suggestion, he put “drinks for 5,000” and was amazed no one queried it.
Although, towards 2017, when he retired from his job as environment editor, the climate crisis had come to dominate his agenda along with biodiversity loss, he had earlier sparred with Monsanto, the US company that was trying to flood the world with genetically modified crops. His concern was to defend the small farmer against big corporations, as well as guarding against the potential dangers of the company’s products. He also wrote a book, McLibel (1997), about the longest libel trial in English history, brought by McDonald’s against campaigners who wrote a pamphlet titled “What’s wrong with McDonald’s”.
But not all his stories were campaigns. He had what he called a “fun trip” to scale Rockall, the outcrop of granite 240 miles west of Orkney, during a dispute arbitrated by the UN about whether it was really part of the British empire.
Although he travelled across continents and said he had tasted teargas in five countries, he was most frequently in Africa, which he often reached by hitching a lift on a plane taking relief to a disaster zone. His affinity with its people was explained because he was born in Accra, the capital of Ghana, son of Barbara (nee Winter-Evans) and Roland Vidal. His father was the UK’s last colonial administrator of the country before its independence.
In 2011 he wrote about his return to the place of his birth and about the midwife who had delivered him, Stella Yeru, who was in her 80s. It was a way of introducing the problems of a population that had grown from 4 million to 25 million, and the increasing healthcare crisis in Africa.
His childhood was spent shuttling between the family’s UK home in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, and Accra, and then Lagos in Nigeria, a later posting for his father. John was educated at English boarding schools, including St Bees in Cumbria, then for the holidays would sail or fly to Africa with his younger brother, Peter. John managed to attend the independence celebrations of both Ghana and Nigeria that his father had organised. His parents then returned to Britain, to Sunderland, where John became a lifelong supporter of their football team.
John went on to study English and economics at Birmingham University, where he worked on the student newspaper and shared a flat with Ozzy Osbourne, the singer-songwriter who was then at the start of his musical career. His first job was at Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, which did not appeal to him, so he moved to Paris to teach English.
John returned to the UK when his father died young, and got his first proper job as a journalist in Oswestry, Shropshire, where his younger brother lived, and his widowed mother came to join them. Soon his talent as a designer got him night shifts subediting on the Sunday Mirror in Manchester.
He first got a job on the Guardian as a sub on the arts desk in 1983, working with Michael Billington and attending literary and film festivals. A memo to the then editor, Peter Preston, suggesting the Guardian should have an environment section, landed him with the title environment editor and a four-page weekly supplement to edit.
Over the years he won many awards for himself and the paper, with a constant flow of stories that highlighted the battles between what he might have called the profits of the fossil-fuel companies, government backsliding, and the health of the planet and its people. Nor did he stop work when he retired, frequently contributing features and comment pieces to the Guardian, and writing another book, Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature, published in June this year. He had always retained his old home in Oswestry, an ancient forge, deep in woodland on the Welsh border.
He was married twice. His first marriage, to Polly Phillimore, ended in divorce. Last month he married his long-term partner, Jenny Bates, a photographer and campaigner with Friends of the Earth, with whom he shared many adventures, and who survives him.
• John Vidal, journalist, born 5 January 1949; died 19 October 2023
