When it comes to conservation issues, the challenge is always to get people across mainstream society interested and acting on the issues. As my husband Andy has always said, there s the 5% who care (who are already converted to the cause), the 5% who'll never care, but it s the 90% in the middle that we need to reach for real change to happen. This was the premise of Earth Hour when it first started in 2007, reaching out with a symbolic action that we could all do (turning off the lights for an hour), making it fun so kids could do it, families, couples, businesses, anyone really, and then mobilising that interest to create a movement of millions of people for change.
Last week, Matson & Ridley Safaris co-founder and my hubby, Andy Ridley, was awarded the prestigious GQ Man of the Year Award (social force category). Other winners on the night included Hollywood stars Joel Edgerton, Elizabeth Debicki and Emily Ratakkowski, sporting legend Kurt Fernley, media personality Todd Sampson, Grace Forrest (Twiggy Forrest's daughter & founder of the Walk Free Foundation to end slavery) and the awesome Australian Invictus Games team. It was a star-studded room full of actors, models, directors, business moguls, digital movers and shakers, journalists and media heavyweights. Andy used his acceptance speech to raise the profile of the Great Barrier Reef, to remind people that it s not dead, but that we are going to have to work together to save it. Congratulations Mr Ridley - you are really the epitome of the saying 'perseverance pays off'.
You can get behind Andy's efforts to conserve the reef by signing up to Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef here.
Watch Andy's interview on Sky News here.
"I m so lucky to work in a place that is so magnificent, but it is battered and bruised. But it is amazing, and wonderful, and worth fighting every minute of the day for. I beseech you to help us do that." Andy Ridley, on the Great Barrier Reef