KEY POINTS:
Jeanette Fitzsimons remains calm while the world burns. Headlines are screaming with news we need another couple of planets to sustain human life, but none of this is news to her.
She's been warning that the end of the world is nigh for years. While the rest of
us awake to our global-warming epiphany she bows her grey head and rubs her hands together, in the mystical way she is wont to do, and pops outside to plant a tree.
It's a miniature kowhai, planted in Parliament's rose garden, in memory of the Greens' late co-leader Rod Donald who died a year ago this past Monday. He died too early to see Green issues thrust suddenly into the mainstream and a year too soon to watch the Greens' mocking sceptics drop the name-calling, take a sharp u-turn and try to find room on the environmental bandwagon.
The irony doesn't escape his co-leader Fitzsimons. "We've been called all kinds of things in the past," she says. "I can remember [former Act leader] Richard Prebble once saying that he wouldn't want to have dinner with me because I grew lettuces in my own shit, which is totally untrue actually. But in considering whether to say 'I told you so' or whether to feel angry about all the abuse in the past, I just ask, 'Well, is this going to do anything to stop the ice melting?' And the answer is clearly 'no'."
It must be difficult though to restrain herself. Climate change is now firmly at the top of the world's popular political agenda thanks to former American Vice President Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth and Britain's doom-predicting Stern report.
A few years ago we argued over whether global warming exists, now we agonise over ways to stop it.
What this means for the Greens depends largely on how this 61-year-old grandmother plays the extraordinary political hand she has just been dealt. Fitzsimons would have retired to her eco home and organic farm in 2008 if Donald had not died. But now she is almost certainly staying on, with new co-leader Russel Norman, to steer the Greens through what will either be their finest hour, or the beginning of their end.
With Labour and National scrambling to invent policies to satiate our new appetite for earth-nurturing, will there even be room for the Greens on the political stage?
"Well," says Fitzsimons, "the message I'm getting, from the most cynical media commentators to people on the streets, is that 'we know the Greens have been coming from this place for a long time and we're not sure to what extent we can trust anybody else to be serious about it'."
It remains to be seen whether environmental consistency is enough to convince Green-thinking lefties to risk not voting Labour, if the big party's policies are nearly as green. Fitzsimons doubts Labour will come up with a meaty climate-change policy in the next few months and, even if it did, she reckons it would need Green expertise to implement it.
The Greens' survival, Fitzsimons hopes, lies in pushing the message even further. While it is probably their only hope it is also inherently fraught. Remember the backlash against the Greens' rigid rejection of GE? The last thing the Greens need is to find themselves on the fringes again.
But Fitzsimons is convinced people are ready for a stronger message now than they were even a year ago.
"You've got to be careful that the way you pitch that message doesn't frighten people and turn them off. So when people are not very willing to do anything at all you can persuade them to change their light bulbs. I think we've got to the point where people recognise that changing light bulbs, while, yes it it worth doing, is not going to save the planet."
What might be able to save it are thousands of decisions we make every day, she says. Whether we walk, get a bike, buy locally, or use less power.
"It's about transformation of an entire society and economy in a sustainable direction. And I guess the big message the Greens have been trying to get across for some time is that that sustainable direction is not unpleasant. That using and consuming more and more every year is not making people happy. It never has."
Consuming vast quantities of stuff has never made Fitzsimons happy. She prefers to give and receive home cooking and trees rather than "gadgets". Twenty-month-old Jasper, her first grandchild and pride and joy, is an exception, though even he tends to get hand-made wooden toys.
Being a Green is about living by example, she says. In her case that includes building a house which uses 10 per cent of the average home's electricity, growing her own veges, buying locally and driving a 1300cc Honda Jazz which, she proudly reports, does 100km on 5 litres of gas.
That's in stark contrast to Energy Minister David Parker's thirsty 3000-odd cc Holden which she politely refuses to comment on.
She grew up with an amateur botanist mother and eating organic vegetables grown by her father, but her first dream was of being a concert violinist, not an environmentalist. "I didn't have quite the physical eye-thinker co-ordination that you need to be good enough," she sighs. "I never managed to meet my own standards."
AT 6AM on November 6 last year Fitzsimons' husband Harry answered the phone at their Coromandel home. It was Rod Donald's partner Nicola.
"As I put the phone to my ear I kind of knew ... he must have died. That she wouldn't have rung to say he was sick or he was in hospital."
Otherwise fit and healthy, Donald, 48, had died suddenly of viral myocarditis that morning.
A year on, Fitzsimons says the Green MPs have become even closer. "We miss him a lot. But we are doing the best we can to carry on, which is what he would have wanted."
And a lot has happened that Donald would have wanted in the past year. On Wednesday, two days after the anniversary of his death, the Greens launched the Government-supported Buy Kiwi Made campaign, for which Donald had fought so hard.
But what Donald wanted most was a position at the Cabinet table, which, despite campaigning with Labour in the run-up to last year's election, never happened. Labour left the Greens at the altar to cobble together a coalition with United Future and NZ First. The Greens were gutted.
Prime Minister Helen Clark felt she needed both United Future and NZ First on board to stop them from becoming part of National's camp, Fitzsimons says. They had both refused to work with the Greens.
"I think Helen Clark could have finessed her way around that. But she chose not to."
Does she respect Clark's decision? Fitzsimons slowly answers: "No. I don't. But it's part of political reality and you live with it. You don't get into politics unless you're prepared to play the hand you're dealt."
For her that almost certainly means another term in Parliament post 2008 - if the Greens survive.
She will make a final decision on that early next year. "But the way that I'm feeling at the moment I've got heaps of energy and I'm still enjoying doing what I'm doing and it seems there's still more to be done."
As for the rest of us. Has our collective epiphany come too late to save the world?
"For quite a long time my brain has told me that we're not going to act in time and that we're past the tipping point. But my heart tells me you can't live like that. You've actually got to live as though you can still make a difference and so that's what we are working to do."
For those who also care she has a four-point plan: "Use your car a whole lot less; halve your energy use; hold business to account for what they're doing. And vote Green." At which she puts down her tea and laughs, for the first time in a very serious interview.
