"One of the environmentalists I admire and fear most [is] a man called Mayer Hillman. I admire him because he says what he believes to be true and doesn’t care about the consequences. I fear him because his life is a mirror in which the rest of us see our hypocrisy." - George Monbiot
"He's a Jeremiah figure, lambasting those who will listen for their moral failure to adapt their lifestyle to reduce carbon emissions. For an audience no doubt contemplating their imminent summer holidays, his rage against the scandal of growing carbon emissions from cheap air flights, made for some awkward shifting in seats. He never flies. His message on transport is stark: travel less and best of all, don't travel at all." - Madelaine Bunting, The Guardian
"With the passion of an evangelist and the intellect of a first rate academic...he argued his proposition that carbon rationing is the only realistic way for the world's population to limit damage from climate change." Jane Chisholm, Cambridge Cycling Campaign
"I’d be the first to admit that no-one’s perfect. Well, one man is – the veteran climate campaigner Mayer Hillman." - Mark Lynas
"Being a town planner, social radical and iconoclast, Mayer Hillman has a way of getting to the heart of things. Twenty years ago, he pointed out that most journeys are made on foot - something transport planners had never considered. A decade ago, he turned our ideas about the freedom of the road on their heads by pointing out that our cars had driven our children off the streets of our cities. Now he wants to save the world."- Fred Pearce, New Scientist
"Here’s someone utterly at home with organised austerity. Wartime rationing, to him, is a heroic precedent, accepted by an embattled nation not as desirable, but as necessary, and above all as fair." - Roger East, Forum for the Future
"If Britain enters into a new relationship with the sun, it will be due to the work of one person who had an idea ahead of his time. [Mayer Hillman's] proposal is a social invention, which is as important as a technological one, though rarer. In fact, his case is almost too good to be true. It is a researcher’s dream that all the points in favour should come out like this. A referendum on the issue might well produce a vote in favour - even in Scotland." - The late Michael Young (Lord Young of Dartington)
Mayer Hillman is a brilliant and influential policy analyst. Think tanks may jostle to claim credit for the next idea from the Government or opposition, but Mayer has often been a generation ahead of mainstream thinking. He began worrying about the impact of the car on society and the environment in the 1950s. He started warning us about climate change in the 1980s.
Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive RSA
Mayer Hillman has a track record of speaking uncomfortable truths even before they become uncomfortable. In the late eighties, while the Department of Transport was congratulating itself on reducing pedestrian deaths, Hillman pointed out that death rates were falling because the roads were getting more dangerous—not less. He was right. Road danger was driving a massive decline in walking—so there were fewer pedestrians to be killed—and today's epidemic of fat kids is one of the direct consequences of this.” Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology and population health
Dr Mayer Hillman 