“Anita did more than run a successful ethical business: she was a pioneer of the whole concept of ethical and green consumerism,” Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, wrote in The Evening Standard on Tuesday. “There are quite a few business people today who claim green credentials, but none came anywhere near Anita in terms of commitment and credibility.”

Again this week, like last, I find myself needing to laud a hero of the first order whose passing has left our world poorer for her lack: Dame Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop and dedicated campaigner for the greater good.

Anita died on Monday at the age of 64 after years of living with Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion she received while giving birth, of a brain hemorrhage, but, as it always should be, it's her life that's the important part of the story this week.

Although recognized for her achievements ... she was made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 and was for years the most high-profile business women in the world ... the ripples she created with her first toss of a pebble back in 1976 when she borrowed £4,000, painted dark green over the damp spots on the walls, and opened her first shop are now so much a part of our pond that we may not be able to trace them all back to her.

(The guy who fronted her another £3,000 ... about $1,700 at the time ... to open a second shop received a payout of £137 million ...$278 million today ... when Anita sold the business 30 years later.)

Although ethical consumerism is now mainstream and big business, Anita Roddick started it all. Awareness over packaging, willingness to recycle, demands placed on companies to treat employees fairly and provide safe working environments, markets for organic goods and Fair Trade products ... all can be traced to the efforts and ethics of Anita Roddick.

As one tribute to her notes:

Today we say she did it “at just the right time”, as The Times obituary puts it. But nobody else did it; she made it the right time.

Even politicians, never supportive of what some saw as radical ideas or lining up to seize her green agenda and force it into law, are hailing her now, like British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying she, “inspired millions to the cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market”.

As the money started pouring in, Anita started pouring it right back out again, filling the coffers of charities.

In 1990 she set up Children on the Edge, an organization designed to help children post-conflict and natural disasters, get kids out of state care, support refugee, migrant kids and HIV/AIDS orphans, and advocate for the rights of disabled children.

Children on the Edge has programs in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Romania, East Timor, Indonesia, Moldova, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and the United Kingdom.

Any look back over the life of Anita Roddick is jammed with interesting, inspiring stories, but one is especially fascinating for our forum here ...

Anita's parents divorced when she was a child. Shortly after, her mother married her first husband's cousin, and man named Henry. Anita said later that she'd always felt closer to Henry than to her father, and when he died of tuberculosis some years after marrying her mother, Anita missed him terribly.

When Anita reached the age of 18, her mother confessed that Henry was, in fact, Anita's biological father, the result of a passionate extramarital affair. Anita said the news made her feel, “as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted from my shoulders.”

For an amazing life and what we can all hope will be a lasting legacy, I offer my thanks to Anita Roddick, and add that I am proud to have shared the planet with her.


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