Modbury is a little gentrified Devon town with cutesy shops, gourmet delis and lovely architecture. In the past three months, house prices appear to have shot up by 20 per cent over the normal rise, a spike, it seems, directly linked to Rebecca Hosking, a local farmer's daughter who works for the BBC. It was Hosking's return to the town after a 15-year absence that brought it to international attention when, at the end of last year, she embarked on a one-woman mission to rid Modbury's shops and pavements of plastic carrier bags.
Within a year of arriving back from Hawaii, where she had been filming a BBC Natural World documentary showing plastic pollution on its beaches, there was barely a plastic bag in sight. Everybody from genteel old folk through to builders in hard hats had cornstarch shoppers swinging from their arms. Modbury had become Britain's first official plastic-bag-free town and, as others looked set to follow suit as a result - including 33 London boroughs - Modbury found itself in the constant glare of the press. Rarely a day went past without the butcher being hauled out onto the pavement to be interviewed.
'The local estate agent hugged me in the street,' she remembers. 'He said, "Rebecca, do you realise what you've done? Thank you! Thank you!" But when people meet me and tell me they have a second home in Devon, I think, "Oh, you're one of the ones I need to put a pipe bomb through your letterbox, quite frankly".'
It hardly needs saying that Hosking is a Modbury girl to the marrow, so we had agreed to meet at her favourite café. She first suggested we meet in a lay-by on the main road where I could pull in and then follow her to a nearby plastic-polluted beach, but when I gently insisted that, after a three-hour drive with a five-month-old baby in the back, I might need a cup of tea and the loo, she acquiesced. Nevertheless, she's not the kind of woman with whom I'd pick a fight and she remained determined to get me down to the beach, despite the wind and rain.
The afternoon we meet she had, in fact, been due to dash off to London to be interviewed for Newsnight in its People of 2007 slot. However there had been some confusion over her expenses and she'd refused to go: 'I'm not going if they're not paying,' she tells me bluntly, 'it's really disorganised! I wouldn't have those people on my team!' (They must have eventually coughed up since, a few weeks later, I see her, calm and composed, being interviewed in front of a fish tank by Gavin Esler).
After just10 minutes in her company it begins to make sense why it had to be Hosking who somehow managed to galvanise an entire nation into action, inspire councils and traders and elicit applause from Gordon Brown. She is keen to play down her role but I suspect there is a small part of her that is quite enjoying it. (Certainly the town's traders, to whom she is 'Beck', treat her like she is a kind of unwitting hero, which she seems to enjoy.) 'My advantage is that I was born here, and so everybody in the town knew and trusted me. It was the people of Modbury who were responsible. I'm nothing special, all I did was show my film. Everybody could do the same.'
Hosking grew up on her father's farm (which as an only child she will one day inherit), attended the local primary school (where her mother was a teacher) and then the state comp. As a local, her opinions had some currency and so traders were open to attending a screening of her film.
Through Message in the Waves, Hosking revealed some horrible truths: how plastic rubbish on a mammoth scale - anything from lighters and asthma inhalers to bags, toys, bottles, toothbrushes and pens - is being blown into the sea where it then chokes or poisons the wildlife. Hosking had held a dying albatross in her arms and fished a plastic bag out of the mouth of a choking 50-year-old turtle. The horror of it all meant she returned to England a changed woman, with a desperate need to feel rooted in a community: 'I felt I was sleepwalking before,' she says. 'I suppose I was like everybody else. It was my job to be ethically minded but I wasn't really. I bought things and didn't think about the bills, I drove a lot, I was doing all the things that everybody does on a normal day and doesn't think about.'
She says she regards her place in life to be educating people, through her camera work and by pointing out what is happening and, indeed, Hosking has an impressive array of information at her fingertips, not to mention a passionate way of delivering it. At one point she grabs my pad and draws a complicated diagram showing how rubbish moves around the gulf streams surrounding Hawaii (I'm none the wiser but beginning to get the message).
Her conversation constantly returns to terrifying plastic-bag statistics: how, for example, the world uses more than 1.2 trillion of them a year, an average of about 300 bags for every adult; how each plastic bag is used on average for only 12 minutes before being discarded; how 80 per cent of marine rubbish comes off the land and nearly 90 per cent of that is plastic; how plastic is lethal in the marine environment, killing at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year and how, even after the animal dies, its body decomposes so that the plastic is released back into the environment where it can kill again; how an estimated one million seabirds choke or get tangled in plastic nets and debris every year. And so the horror goes on.
At 34, Hosking is an attractive woman, tall and broad with a ruddy face (as a result of the punishing Devon air and the sun-scorched climate abroad), fair, wavy hair and a strong Devon accent. She is wearing heavy boots and jeans. Such has been the extraordinary nationwide impact of her localised, proactive approach to the environment, that her life apart from plastic bags has been generally overlooked: 'When I saw "Rebecca-plastic-bags-Hosking" on some website or other, my heart just sank,' she admits.
Despite what Hosking says, she is special, both for her bulldozing drive and her immense integrity. It is no coincidence that she is one of only five women (five!) who film for the BBC Natural History Unit. After a completing her degree in film and photography at Napier University in Edinburgh, she admits she slightly lost her way figuring out what to do next: 'I toyed with the idea of fashion photography and did the whole works - heels, make-up, I was a lot skinnier back then, super-girlie.'
I must look shocked. The idea of Hosking mincing around in heels and lippy seems as ludicrous as imagining her with a plastic bag. She quickly assures me it was just a phase. 'It would never have lasted. It wasn't for me, that stuff is not in my soul. I'm comfortable now. I'm not trying to be somebody I'm not.'
Having identified that she wanted to work outside with nature, her big break came in 1999, when she beat thousands of applicants to one of two prestigious places on the BBC Natural History Unit's training programme. She was the first woman ever to be accepted on the scheme and is now a respected camerawoman. It is, she says, still difficult being a woman in a man's world: 'I have to say "mate" a lot and not be too feminine. Now I am more feminine because I gave up on trying to hide it, but if you're dragging yourself through Costa Rican rainforests, it doesn't work to be too girlie. You're hauling great big heavy camera gear and you're there with an all-male crew. You're one of the boys, you are asexual and you are there to do the job.'
She travels a lot and always with men, often with other people's husbands for long periods of time: 'Women like me suffer because who wants their husband to go away for three months with a woman they've never met? If a married producer has the choice between choosing a man and a woman, he'll choose the man. There's less explaining to do at home. But I'm a woman and that's who I am. I am a woman who is able to film and direct, take it or leave it. I'm not going to weave my way in to fit somebody else's agenda.'
A few months ago, when the plastic-bag campaign was at its height, Hosking received two offers from two big companies, both asking her to be their environmental public face: 'I'm not going to say who,' she says (although later she lets slip that they were supermarkets), 'but they were offering me silly money, an enormous amount - to be a green puppet for them, a face for them. I turned it down immediately because it chips away at your soul. I think the reason the plastic-bag campaign has been so successful is there is no agenda with Modbury or with me. I work closely with various groups but I'm just me and it's just our town.'
In the middle of our conversation, I feel a rumble in my daughter's nappy that quickly turns into an explosion. When I get to the loo to change her, I realise with dismay that I only have a plastic Sainsbury's bag in which to contain the dirty nappy. To my shame, it is my usual method of dealing with such a business. Not only is this clearly unacceptable in Modbury but I realise that Hosking has already converted me. 'I'll take that from you!' says the Modbury café lady when I emerge holding the un-bagged nappy.
It strikes me that, until meeting Hosking, I have been completely representative of the general public's attitude to plastic bags, particular those picked up at supermarkets. Sometimes I have so many orange Sainsbury's bags piling up in the larder that I run out of space to put the food. My local store has introduced recycling bins but I've never used them. In fact, in the middle of Hosking's campaign, Gordon Brown made his first significant green speech in which he announced that he intended to call a meeting of all supermarkets to see how their carriers could be eliminated altogether. 'Every year in Britain, over 13 billion single-use carrier bags are distributed - over 10 bags a week for every household,' he said. Ten? That was me on a good week. I feel pretty sure though that, if supermarkets do not supply long-lasting and more sustainable alternatives, busy mothers like me will just carry on.
Message in the Waves was pivotal for Hosking in a much more personal way. It was the first project she undertook with her boyfriend, Tim Green, an assistant producer at the Natural History Unit who, back in 1999, got down to the last three candidates for the same trainee programme only to lose out to Hosking. They became friends and then, after a year, a couple. She seems not to have held it against him that, for a while, he went round saying, 'This is the bird who got my job', and, 'They only gave it to her because she's a bird'. Acquiring funding for the film - 'these things are a law unto themselves' - was a breakthrough, not only professionally but also for their seven-year-relationship as it allowed them to live in Hawaii together for 14 months: 'For some parts of our relationship we have been ships passing in the night,' she admits. Why did he not want to be part of the campaign? I ask her. It was, after all, his film too: 'He could never have done it,' she says. 'For it to work in Modbury, it had to be me.'
Nevertheless, Green agreed to move back to Modbury with her in an attempt to streamline their life and because she wanted to feel rooted again: 'I'd been running away from Modbury for about 15 years,' she admits, 'going as far away as I could. I wasn't sure whether I wanted the responsibility of taking on my father's farm. I think in principle, I do now, at some point in the future. But right now I think it's probably quite important to localise yourself, batten down the hatches and have a life where you can sustain yourself a bit. I sound like a green campaigner!'
The couple gave up their rented cottage outside Bristol and took on a small flat in the middle of the high street. She admits that Green was only half joking when she told him about the offers from the companies and he said: 'How much? How many zeroes? Take it! Becks, think of what it would sort out for us!' On hearing how they are now working on a new film treatment ('can't tell you, it's a secret') and will soon begin the tiresome slog to get funding, I can't help agreeing with him. The couple no longer have a television and they try to spend the bare minimum. Hosking says her New Year's resolution is to 'make do and mend'. 'You know,' she says, 'like in the war. When something breaks, you fix it, you don't go and buy a replacement.' It must be hard work living with Hosking's integrity.
What about having children? I ask, thinking that you'd be hard pressed to find a less compatible job. 'There are some family teams who go off - if you want that kind of life,' she says. It sounds amazing, I say. 'Yeah, on paper,' she responds drily. 'It's a great experience for the kids but you have to question that kids need kids around them. I don't know...' She trails off.
I tell her about an exchange still lodged in my memory when, heavily pregnant a couple of years ago, I met the poet Nick Laird (married to Zadie Smith), who asked me with real feeling, 'How can you bring a child into this kind of world?' I relay to her how I told him that I like to think that a new generation of liberal, environmentally aware children is our best chance of making the world a better place. She sighs: 'It's a bit too much of a big question for me to answer,' she replies. For the first time in our meeting, she seems at a loss for words.
Hosking and I eventually pile into the car and drive to a nearby beach. We park and, quick as a flash, she's off across the dunes towards the rocks, littered with Coca-Cola bottles, water bottles and all sorts of plastic tat. The wind is driving around us. She seems oblivious: 'There are pictures of me down on this beach as a toddler,' she shouts. She is busy collecting rubbish in one of the discarded bags. 'Back then, I swam with dolphins and in the pools there were flounders and flat fish. You used to be able to pick up handfuls of freshwater shells, too. Now all I find are nurdles, look!' She holds out her hand to show me tiny plastic pre-production plastic balls, deadly to many sea creatures because they resemble fish eggs. 'I often stand here now and look out on to the bay and it's so empty. It's lonely. The wildlife doesn't come any more.'
She shows me some plastic rubbish and points to my daughter: 'This stuff is so durable that it will still be around in her lifetime, in her daughter's lifetime, in her daughter's daughter's lifetime. It just doesn't go away. It takes four centuries to clean up the mess. I just want people to understand that when they think about throwing it away. We can re-use it.'
As we walk back to the car, separately (Hosking is still collecting rubbish), she calls out: 'That thing you said about children being our chance to make it better. Maybe you're right. It's a nice thought.'
