Peter and the rhino

"Suddenly I could fix my environmental concerns and I could fix my health."

by Peter Barclay

This is a story about two beasts of battle. In one corner you have a seasoned explorer, one who doesn't shy away when the going gets tough and has taken his fair share of knocks. Peter Eastwood is a venturer of sorts. When it comes to business he's a sailor sniffing the breeze.

In the corner opposite stands an ancient creature. Arrogant in its own way, the rhino stands almost totally safe except for a poacher's flying bullet.

It's a comparison that might seem laughable in a contest anywhere on an African plain but there's one thing these two beasts have in common, they both eat plants.

For Peter Eastwood, becoming plantbased came about because of a combination of things, but the initial impetus happened through business.

“I’d been involved with Rhino conservation since 2009. Then I was challenged by my technical manager at work on why I didn’t do something for New Zealand instead of just for Africa.”

A discussion arose around what could be done.

“She said we should be more environmentally friendly. But what does that mean, what is it?”

As he thought of it at the time, “I’ve got to run a business here. I’m not here for handouts – leave all that to the bloody greenies, you know.”

Back then, he says, “I was really right wing.”

His technical manager asked if she could form a committee and come back with some proposals.

“I said yeah, fine. So, she came back a week later and said we should look in the rubbish skips and then we’ll work out what we can avoid throwing in the rubbish. That took us on a journey within the company where we found all of these huge savings

Peter and the rhino

"Suddenly I could fix my environmental concerns and I could fix my health."

that made it far better for the environment.

As a CEO Peter says he was embarrassed to admit that it could have happened.

“We were shipping product from our sister company in the UK to New Zealand. Then we changed the packing, put them into a similar-sized box and shipped them out to our retailers. She said most of the stuff we are throwing away are used boxes from the UK.

“I said, oh, we shouldn’t be doing that. I thought we were reusing them, but she said we used to do that but there are thousands now that we are a lot bigger.”

By this point, the company was throwing away about 5 tonnes of boxing material a month.

Next step – Peter was on the phone telling his UK friend that they needed to change the size of the box to the same format used in New Zealand. It was a simple solution but it was also Peter’s first step toward environmental awareness.

“And then I got told about Earth Overshoot Day. A day that marks the date when every bit of energy the earth used after September was borrowing from the future or wasn’t sustainable. So, I now started driving my car slower.

“Well, I used to get lots of tickets anyway, but I calculated that this only used 11% less fuel. I thought, heck, I need to reduce my impact by at least 25% and if I really want to reverse climate change I have to go way beyond 25% to cover for all those who don't give a damn. And for one person that gives a damn, there’s ten or more that don’t. "Well, I thought that’s not going to do it, I’m going to have to stop going to work or stop flying business class and start flying economy."

The turning point

major happened.

“I got really sick. It turned out it was glandular fever. Then three different people from three different walks of life said to me at the time, give up eating meat. Just eat vegetable soups to recover. Just take meat out of your diet.

“And I thought, are you mad! I’ll die if I don’t eat meat. I have to eat meat to live. Where would I get my protein?”

The upshot was that he cut his meat consumption completely and credits the people who spoke to him at the time for helping him make the change.

“One was a vegan, but the other two weren’t. It sowed a little seed in my head, and I thought how can you cut out meat when you are recovering? It didn’t make sense to me. I thought you would have to eat more meat to get your strength up.

“Then, my friend that did all the research on my Rhino projects sent me a link to the movie Cowspiracy. Well, I’d seen on her

Peter and the rhino

Facebook page some talk about vegan stuff, and I thought ah shit she’s gone vegan on me!"

It didn't go done well because his ex-wife had gone vegan, "and she was sick all the time. She had the worst diet I could ever imagine. "I just thought ah, no. So, I put this message into the rainy-day email list to worry about some other time.”

Then, one Saturday he was sitting in a hotel in Liverpool going through old emails.

Oh that email

“I came across this email again, and I thought, oh God. If I don’t watch it now, I’m never going to watch it. Then I opened it and saw she had paid for it. I thought, I really have to watch it if she has paid for it.

“I watched it and thought this is so much bullshit. There’s no way you can save all this energy and have all this good health – I’d have known about it. I come from New Zealand. I’ve had a good education. How could I have not known about it?”

Then he did some more research and read "The China Study" by T Colin Campbell which the movie Cowspiracy is based on .

“I started reading the book, and I went vegan overnight. Then I thought I’m not going to tell anybody, especially my kids because I’ve been on every diet imaginable.”

But The China Study was what really cemented his views.

“It was then I realised that wow, we really have had the wool pulled over our eyes.”

Next he began to tell people that he was vegan, and finally, he told his kids. They were far from convinced initially and took bets on how long he would last.

“They just laughed when I told them. My daughter was kind of vegetarian, flexitarian at the time. So, she was kind of sympathetic, but the boys weren’t because we didn’t use to have many vegetables before that. It was all meat really.

“Now I could see I could fix my environmental concerns, and I could fix my health because I was out of control on my health. I went to my doctor, and he was not impressed. Then I got my blood test back, and it wasn’t impressive, but I’d been having a really bad run (business pressures), so the start point could have been a hell of a lot worse than we thought it was. We also looked at what I was eating. What I was eating was vegan, but it was far from healthy.”

Improving the diet

With a bit more work on the content of the diet and another blood test, Peter found himself back in the doctor’s surgery six months later.

“The doctor said I just want to talk to you some more about this diet because you’ve got better bloods now than what you’ve had in all your tests over 25 to 30 years. He said you can go off all your blood pressure medication and all your cholesterol medication and I said, I stopped taking those medications a while ago!”

His doctor was amazed. By this time Peter had begun to take control of his health and was now regularly testing his blood pressure, “because with all the flying and everything else I just needed to keep it under control.”

But there were other benefits as well. For a long time, he had been experiencing pain in the heels of his feet, that was gone. He’d also experienced terrible back pain, that was also gone.

“And I used to forget things all the time, so my staff would have a field day with me. If they didn’t want to do something, they’d just say you didn’t tell me, and I was thinking, I’m pretty sure I did. Then suddenly I was back to going no, I know I told you. I told you in that meeting three weeks ago on a Thursday. Suddenly they realised they couldn’t wind me up anymore.”

Life has worked out well for Peter but not always as he expected. After leaving Wellington’s Taita College in the late 70s, he desperately wanted to be a motor mechanic but got invited to work full time at the textile factory he had worked at after school. He achieved quite a high position there, but it came at a price.

“There was so much travelling. I was away from my kids when they were growing up, and I decided this wasn’t for me. I tried a few other things then I opened a homebrew shop in 1989. That shop struggled for the first year or two, and then a change in the law on distilling came in, and that meant I could sell stills instead of just homebrew kits.”

A new life

That lead to a whole new way of life.

“Firstly, I worked with some local suppliers to develop stills for making spirits at home. I then merged with my equipment supplier and purchased Ma and Pa businesses overseas. We grew organically from about $700,000 turnover to $55 to $60 million. In our niche it was the biggest

supplier of homebrewing in the world.”

Peter eventually sold out of the business and now enjoys the freedom to do what he wants. He has become a big supporter of projects that fit with his new way of life and a significant backer of vegan movies.

The entrepreneurial spirit has never left him, but in the beginning, it wasn’t something he knew he had.

A different attitude

“I didn’t know there was anything unique about the way I thought. There’s two things about an entrepreneur. They have a different attitude to fear than other people, and they’re also never satisfied.

“An entrepreneur can never sit back and say that was a great effort. We’ve done a good job there. Or, we should sit back and celebrate that and take a bit of a holiday now. Their makeup doesn’t allow that. As soon as you hit one point, you just go to the next.

He warns, however, that for every entrepreneurial scheme that works, there’s a dozen that don’t.

“The trick to being a successful entrepreneur is not finding the right thing to do, it's more often than not realising pretty quickly what you are doing wrong.

“I’ve seen so many businesses that we’ve taken over, and their biggest failing is that they have decided what they want to do, and they just keep on doing it. "For example, if you want to sail from Auckland to the UK, you don’t set one course and just keep on going. You’ve got to change the course every day when you realise the wind is different. "So many businesses I took over were

just on one direction. is your $100,000 US dollars. It’s allocated

“Thirty years ago, when I started in from the April 1st to March 31st next business, you could do the same thing for year. So if you miss that deadline, then the five years, and it wouldn’t be a problem. If money is not there anymore. you did the same thing in business today, “Keeping a deadline in Africa is really you would be out the door.” difficult. And before you can put the well in

Because of Covid-19, Peter says his you might have to build a fence, so there’s operations have made a big change from always a discussion with the chiefs on how education work to humanitarian aid. you are going to get to the endpoint.

“We’ve put a lot of money into feeding “You might have to sit down under a people around the game reserves in tree, and it might take three months of Africa. Based on their 1Rand per meal, talk. He (the chief) has his own agenda too. Tanglewood has probably supplied around He might want a school class so you might 300,000 meals to villagers. The problem is have to build that before you can put the that if they’re hungry, the first thing people wells in.” will do is go into the game reserves and get Peter found a way around that by talking food. So, if we feed them and talk to them to the locals on the ground first to see what about that, then we’ve got a way better was needed, and it worked. chance of saving those animals.” “So, from a relatively small amount

Passion for animals of money, we were able to generate a

Peter finds it hard to identify precisely big effect. I think it comes down to my when he became passionate about saving entrepreneurial skill. You need to cut animals. through the nonsense to see what is

“I’d say 2009 when I started supporting necessary quickly and make a real quick the Rhino, but I loved animals way before call. We always acted quickly. Back in my then. About 2009 was the time when textile days, my boss used to say that all I finally got ahead of that impossible good deals are done quickly and I really situation where you are earning more believe that.” money than you can spend. It was the first Thinking back to the time when he time I really had spare money. first watched Cowspiracy Peter says it’s

“There’s a real problem in conservation remarkable how the changes he’s now because most conservation funds come made have managed to satisfy all the things from corporates and the big funds come he had become so concerned about. from European banks. But they have a “It was the environment, health, and the timeline that you have to stick to, and in the animals. It was kind of like, wow, three Africa, you can’t stick to a timeline. out of three! Three of the things I really

“For example, say you have a programme cared about could all be affected by me to put in 100 wells to an area where they going vegan. Well, if that was true, there don’t have water. The bank will say here was no reason why I wouldn’t go vegan.” wholefoodliving.life | Winter, 2020 13