David James Bellamy OBE (18 January 1933 – 11 December 2019)[1] was an English academic, botanist, television presenter, author and prominent environmental campaigner in the UK and globally.

[4] A resident of the Pennines in County Durham,[3][6] Bellamy died from vascular dementia at a care home in Barnard Castle on 11 December 2019, at the age of 86.

[2] Bellamy's first work in a scientific environment was as a laboratory assistant at Ewell Technical College[7] before he studied for a Bachelor of Science degree at Chelsea.

[8] The work that brought him to public prominence was his environmental consultancy on the Torrey Canyon oil spill in 1967, about which he wrote a paper in the leading scientific journal, Nature.

The project includes a 60-metre path from Tow Law to the Hedleyhope Fell reserve, and 150 metres of boardwalk made from recycled plastic bottles.

[17] After Bellamy's TV appearances concerning the Torrey Canyon disaster, his exuberant and demonstrative presentation of science topics featured on programmes such as Don't Ask Me along with other scientific personalities such as Magnus Pyke, Miriam Stoppard, and Rob Buckman.

[20] In the late 1980s, he fronted a campaign in Jersey, Channel Islands, to save Queens Valley, the site of the lead character's cottage in Bergerac, from being turned into a reservoir because of the presence of a rare type of snail, but was unable to stop it.

David Bellamy was the president of the British Institute of Cleaning Science, and was a strong supporter of its plan to educate young people to care for and protect the environment.

The David Bellamy Awards Programme is a competition designed to encourage schools to be aware of, and act positively towards, environmental cleanliness.

[2] In Bellamy's foreword to the 1989 book The Greenhouse Effect,[24] he wrote: The profligate demands of humankind are causing far-reaching changes to the atmosphere of planet Earth, of this there is no doubt.

The greenhouse effect may melt the glaciers and ice caps of the world, causing the sea to rise and flood many of our great cities and much of our best farmland.Bellamy's later statements on global warming indicate that he subsequently changed his views.

[26] Bellamy subsequently accepted that his figures on glaciers were wrong, and announced in a letter to The Sunday Times in 2005 that he had "decided to draw back from the debate on global warming",[27] although Bellamy jointly authored a paper with Jack Barrett in the refereed Civil Engineering journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, entitled "Climate stability: an inconvenient proof" in May 2007.