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I expect Robin Maynard, communications director of the Soil Association, to be so wholesome it hurts, but he turns out to be refreshingly pragmatic.

'We could all be John the Baptist types living in the wilderness, but we might not be very happy,' he says. 'I sometimes do things that a purer environmentalist might say were not good enough.'

Before you panic, be reassured that the voice of the UK's organic farmers is not having whalemeat and fossil fuel bonfires in his garden. He is merely talking about occasionally going on holiday in an aeroplane (he offsets the carbon emissions) and using the odd disposable nappy to clothe his daughter.

But these tiny examples illustrate his point - being environmentally sound can be difficult, and communicating environmentalism even more so. We can cycle to work, have an organic vegetable box delivered and recycle our bottles until we are blue in the face, but there will always be something more we could be doing to save the planet.

Maynard, 48, is doing better than most, despite the disposable nappies. He has been involved in the green movement since reading English at Worcester College in Oxford. There, he wanted to float an inflatable whale on the lake to promote Greenpeace, but the college was having none of it.

'The issues have got more complicated since then,' he says. 'In the old days you could just rail against whale killing and say, Stop it, stop it, stop it, but now you have to create alternatives.'

Green light

The Soil Association's focus is on providing alternatives to conventional farming by promoting organic food and sustainable agriculture. The charity is an odd hybrid - it has a commercial arm that makes its money out of certifying other people's food, and a charitable campaigning arm that has worked on, amongst other things, improving the quality of school dinners.

Maynard has been in situ for just over a year, and has already found himself at the centre of an organic scandal. Some of the UK's butchers are selling meat that is not certified organic - and charging a huge premium for it. They say the certification is too expensive, but the Soil Association is less than impressed. 'People have a right to know what they are buying,' says Maynard. Trading Standards officers are now leading an investigation into organic and non-organic meat.

A fight between your local butcher and a powerful organic food lobby has all the hallmarks of a real ethical dilemma for consumers, but Maynard thinks the most important thing is to communicate the benefits of organic food correctly.

 'Organic food is a primary health service - we need to communicate to people that this is not just for the middle class,' he says. But isn't it terribly expensive? 'That depends on how you buy it,' he shoots back. 'An organic box scheme isn't expensive, and people enjoy seasonality. They are beginning to enjoy not being able to get onions if they are out of season. You might say people like the sensuality of inconvenience.'

Ad nauseam

With a turn of phrase like that, you can tell that Maynard used to be in advertising. In a gloriously ironic twist, his first job after college involved trying to get people to use more fossil fuels. 'One of the accounts I worked on was the Electricity Council - they had absurd ideas, things that could be produced to encourage people to use more electricity such as electric yoghurt makers. It wasn't difficult to work out even then that this wasn't a good idea.'

Small wonder, then, that Maynard dropped out and became a tree surgeon ('My parents did wonder if it was a viable career option'), and then an English teacher in Egypt. On his return he volunteered to work for Friends of The Earth, just before the fallout from Chernobyl put environmentalism squarely on the political agenda.

'All these farmers were ringing us up and asking what the implications were for them, because the government wasn't telling them,' Maynard recalls. 'We were these hairy hippies who previously knew nothing, but all of a sudden we had all the knowledge.'

Without any formal communications or PR training, Maynard reckons he got by on 'youthful enthusiasm' and a belief in what he was promoting. 'I learned a bit from teaching English - and I realised that in advertising, the missing ingredient had been believing in what I was saying.'

Maynard also became a master of the environmental stunt during this period, flying planes over the Chelsea Flower Show with banners proclaiming 'Peat belongs in bogs' ('You'd never do that now,' he admits) and taking a python into a children's television show, where it nearly strangled unfortunate presenter Emma Freud.

'The curse and gift of a campaigner is the ability to take a brief and communicate something you are passionate about,' Maynard says. 'I had a very, very good mentor who taught me to put together the information and find the people who were going to be your allies.'

Rolling stone

Maynard learned enough about communicating to become the voice of BBC Radio's Farming Today, a job that he says gave him 'so much power, because we could talk about whatever we wanted.' He then did a show with Carlton TV to celebrate the Millennium, and worked with Zac Goldsmith on the Ecologist. Afterwards he moved back into campaigning, first with the Soil Association for a brief stint, and then Friends of the Earth again, before moving back to the Soil Association to take on his current role.

One of his biggest problems there is making sure people know what the charity, which celebrates its 60th birthday this year, does, as the focus on farming and food standards isn't entirely clear from the organisation's name. 'People keep telling me that we should change it, that it is anachronistic, but I think it is important that we make people understand what this organisation is about. We are all of us dependent on eight inches of topsoil. It isn't just dirt, it is our lives, even if we don't know it yet.'

And if Maynard tires of that, there's always the revolting butchers. There seems to be enough to keep even a seasoned campaigner busy at the Soil Association - and that's without any recycling.

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