Bob Boote, who has died aged 99, combined a career as a planner with activism as a conservationist and served as the first director general of the Nature Conservancy Council, from 1973 to 1980.
In the years before his appointment Boote had done much to raise public awareness of conservation and pollution issues. In 1967, under the pen name Robert Arvill, he published Man and Environment; Crisis and the Strategy of Choice, which brought together an impressive amount of material to give a comprehensive survey of how 1960s Britain was failing in its duty to the environment.
Boote proposed a radical strategy which helped set the scene for government initiatives over the next 20 years, based on education and changes to the planning system to take better account of human impact on land, air, water and wildlife. The book became essential reading for conservationists and planners.
In 1970, as chairman of the Conservation Committee of the Council of Europe, he initiated and organised European Conservation Year, a campaign involving 21 countries, to raise awareness of the necessity of protecting and conserving the environment, with 200,000 events and projects such as tree planting, reclamation of industrial sites and the creation of nature reserves.
The previous year Boote had appeared in a short film produced by the Central Office of Information to promote progressive Britons to the world, in which he was seen showing how polluted sites in his native Staffordshire, scarred by pottery makers’ claypits and heaps of smouldering waste, had been transformed through reclamation and rewilding. Edited for a wider audience it was re-released in 1970 as Black Spot to Beauty Spot.
Robert Edward Boote was born into a Methodist family on February 6 1920 in Stoke-on-Trent, the son of a local official. Even as a young boy he hated the ravaged environment of the Potteries: “I never took kindly to disused claypit,” he recalled. “It offended my conscience.”
From Hanley High School, in 1936 he joined Stoke’s architectural department. During the war he served with anti-aircraft units in the south of England and later spent time with the Greek Army as a liaison officer, for which he was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal by the Greek government in 1946. He was demobbed in the honorary rank of Major.
Returning to Stoke, in 1948 Boote was appointed chief administrative officer in Staffordshire’s new planning and development department. In 1952 he gained a diploma in public administration and a BSc from the University of London. Two years later he joined Nature Conservancy, then an organ of the Natural Environment Research Council.
He rose to be deputy director before Nature Conservancy morphed into the Nature Conservancy Council, with Boote as its director-general.
During his time with the council he served as an adviser or chairman of committees concerned with the environment, and advised government and select committees as well as committees of the UN, Unesco, the EEC and OECD. He also served on the editorial boards of journals related to planning and the environment.
After retiring from the NCC he became involved in campaigns to protect Antarctica, speaking at intergovernmental conferences, and for 10 years, from 1988 to 1998, was founder chairman of Age Resource, which aims to involve older people in environmental ventures and research.
Boote was chosen as a BBC Man of Action in 1977 and was awarded several prizes including, in 1995, the Nature Conservation Prize of the Council of Europe. He was appointed CVO in 1971.
In 1948 he married Vera Badian, an Austrian-born nurse. She died in 2015 and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Bob Boote, born February 6 1920, died November 25 2019