Protester in Pinstripes

By Helen Gibson/North Wales

The name Greenpeace immediately conjures up images of scruffy activists blocking railroad tracks to stop nuclear-waste shipments or challenging whaling ships in rubber rafts. So it's surprising to find in the ranks of this radical green group a button-down business tycoon named Malcolm Walker, who heads Iceland, a British retail food chain with 760 stores and annual revenues of $2.7 billion. But Walker, 53, whose personal fortune of $40 million puts him on the British "Rich List" compiled by the Sunday Times of London, sees nothing incongruous about his consorting with environmental militants. "I wear a suit. I run a company. I'm interested in profit," he says. "But I'm a member of Greenpeace because no sane person can argue with what they stand for. They want to stop whaling, nuclear pollution and factories dumping poisons into rivers. What's wrong with any of that?"

Unlike many businesses that "window dress," as Walker puts it, their annual reports with environmental mission statements, he's been willing to take a hit on the bottom line, if necessary. In the mid-'80s, when Greenpeace was protesting Norwegian whaling, he canceled a huge prawn contract with Norway at considerable cost, and has done no more business with the country.

Making a profit and protecting the planet don't have to be incompatible. Iceland, which sells kitchen appliances as well as food, has been a leader in marketing freezers and refrigerators that don't damage the atmospheric ozone layer, which protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Old models were cooled by chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which can seep out and attack the ozone. And early CFC substitutes, though less destructive, were still not ideal. Last year Iceland brought out a brand of appliances cooled by isobutane, which does no harm to the atmosphere. On the food front, Walker tries to be a purist. He's been in the vanguard of the European campaign against genetically altered food and has now banished all artificial colors and flavors from Iceland-label products.

He may love his yacht and Elizabethan manor home in Cheshire, near Iceland's North Wales base, but Walker is also fond of his organic garden. "I want to leave a world at least as good as it is now to my children," he says. It's a platitude in the mouths of most, but from Walker, it's a mission he tries to fulfill. --By Helen Gibson/North Wales