We recently welcomed Dr Linda Selvey into the fold here at Greenpeace as our new CEO.
Linda comes to Greenpeace Australia Pacific after a long career as a medical doctor, cancer researcher and public health advocate. For more than 12 years, she held senior management positions in Queensland Health, including Executive Director, Population Health Queensland. She is highly respected professionally and personally within the field of public health in Queensland and nationally.
Her environmental cred is pretty good too. At the age of 21, Linda joined the Australian Conservation Foundation and got very active in their Queensland-based campaigns. She was a volunteer with The Wilderness Society and the Rainforest Conservation Society.
More recently, Linda has been Chair of the Queensland Conservation Council since 2001 and represented Queensland on the Council of the Australian Conservation Foundation (1995-97 and 2004-06). In 2007, she was trained by Al Gore as a climate change presenter and has since conducted 25 presentations to large audiences across the country and overseas. Linda says meeting Al Gore was “fabulous, very inspiring … I learned an incredible amount and my interest and motivation to do something about climate change expanded dramatically.”
Linda sees strong links between health advocacy and environmentalism. A few years ago, she got to see first-hand the health implications of climate change when she travelled to Nepal and India. She was there to work on a polio eradication program for the World Health Organisation and noticed just how much people living a subsistence lifestyle were dependent on the regularity of the seasons. She says the experience “taught me humility and helped me understand that the Western way of doing things is not the only way”.
Linda is perfectly primed to lead us to greater success with all our campaigns to create a green and peaceful future.
We also say farewell to Steve Shallhorn, Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO since November 2005, who moves on to a coordinating role with Greenpeace International.
