Success Quote by Anita Roddick

There’s a neat bit of provocation baked into Anita Roddick’s timeline. By claiming the environmental movement “really only started” in the mid-1970s, she isn’t offering a pedantic history lesson; she’s drawing a hard line between scattered conservation instincts and a mass, culturally legible movement that could pressure governments and corporations. The phrasing has the blunt practicality of a businessperson: movements “start” when they become organized enough to matter in the marketplace and in policy, not when a few visionaries write essays or protect a park.

The mid-’70s anchor is doing a lot of work. It nods to the post–Silent Spring era turning into something institutional: the first Earth Day (1970), the creation of regulatory agencies, energy shocks that made resource limits feel personal, and the rise of modern NGOs and consumer activism. Roddick, who built The Body Shop on ethical branding, is also quietly positioning herself as part of that second wave: the moment when environmental concern became a lifestyle, a purchasing criterion, a brand identity. That’s not cynicism; it’s her terrain.

Subtext: this is newer than we like to pretend, and that lateness is an indictment. If the “real” movement is only a few decades old, then the damage piled up before the public learned to name it, and business can’t hide behind tradition or inevitability. Roddick’s sentence compresses history to sharpen accountability, including her own industry’s. It’s a founding myth with a purpose: urgency, not nostalgia.