HALIFAX - It came as little surprise to those who know Elizabeth May that the environmental crusader ended up at the helm of a party founded on, and named after, green principles.
From her days as an infant being toted through the streets of London at ban-the-bomb protests to fights she and her family waged against herbicide spraying in Cape Breton, friends say she was destined for the forefront of Canada's environmental movement.
"I think it was inevitable," author and environmentalist Farley Mowat said of the leader of the federal Green party.
"She had to run for the leadership of something sooner or later because there's no party in the world fast enough to run away from her. Still, I don't think she has any strong political allegiance as such, but she has enormous allegiance to principle and will pursue principle through hell and high water."
May's political education began at an early age when her family was living on a three-hectare hobby farm in Hartford, Conn., and watching opposition to the Vietnam war gather steam.
Her mother, a Democratic party stalwart, became a model of political protest to May and her younger brother, even carting her baby daughter off to London to participate in marches against nuclear weapons.
May herself claims her interest in the environment emerged when she was just two and told her mother that she hated airplanes.
"She asked me why since I'd never been in one and I said, `Because they scratch the sky,"' May, 54, recalled with a laugh. "So she felt that this was proof that from infancy I had some kind of connectedness to the natural environment.
"I've never known a time when I wasn't very concerned and connected to the natural world."
Years later and after the family had relocated to Cape Breton, May sparked her own protest when she went to court to fight herbicide spraying in Nova Scotia -- a losing battle that ultimately cost the family its home and 28 hectares of land.
It was an early test case for May, who had been studying law at Dalhousie University in Halifax while working as a waitress and cook in the summer at the family restaurant back in Margaree, N.S.
Friends say the demands of school, activism and holding a job set a frenzied pace that she has kept to ever since. She's been even busier since winning the leadership of the Greens in August 2006.
"I keep getting emails from her that have been sent at two in the morning, so she's fully embraced it -- she's working full out," said longtime friend John Bennett in Ottawa.
"She just had her hip replaced and you couldn't walk across Parliament Hill with her without stopping and waiting 10 times because she was in such pain, but she didn't slow down her workload."
The outspoken leader spent 17 years at the Sierra Club, taking it from a relatively small environmental organization with limited reach to an internationally respected advocacy group.
"She put the Sierra Club on the map," says close friend Jim MacNeill, an environmental consultant.
"She was almost single-handedly responsible for keeping these issues on the page in Canada and that says a lot about her courage and her dynamism. She knows the issues."
May is the author of five books on environmental subjects and, in 2005, was inducted as an officer in the Order of Canada.
Her political instincts were scrutinized closely when she decided to run in the Tory stronghold of Central Nova, which has been held by Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay for 10 years.
May and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion stirred up controversy in April when they announced the Liberals would not run a candidate in Central Nova, and the Greens wouldn't run a candidate in Dion's Montreal riding.
"I thought that was a terrible decision -- it looked to me like absolutely inviting annihilation," said Mowat.
"But then I began to see the sense in it. By running against the No. 2 in the Conservative party, she guarantees she'll be known as the gladiator who came out of nowhere and made her mark."
The Green leader also drew fire after comparing the Tory government's climate-change policies to the appeasement of Nazi Germany Still, May is unapologetic, routinely excoriating Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his environmental policies and what she says are undignified antics in the Commons.
She says Harper's election in 2006 convinced her to enter politics. Otherwise, she would have happily stayed on at the Sierra Club.
"I saw about 20 years worth of work on the verge of disappearing down the drain," she said. "His environmental policies are the worst of any prime minister in the history of this country."
May ran on her party's 160-page Vision Green plan, which called for a "polluter pays" carbon tax to curb use of fossil fuels. It also supported regulated emission cuts and a range of social measures to ease poverty, boost preventive health care and improve access to early learning and higher education.
A vegetarian who shares here Ottawa home with her daughter Cate, a Shih Tzu and a cat, May says she lives as "greenly" as possible. She has retrofitted her homes in Ottawa and Nova Scotia to be more energy efficient and only recently bought a car -- a Prius to get around her riding -- but travelled by train for much of the election campaign.
She received a great deal of attention, for a leader of a party that had never elected anyone to Parliament. She also made history for her fledgling Greens by taking part in two leaders' debates.
"I think we've put to bed forever the idea that we're a one-issue party; I think that's been laid to rest," she said after the English-language debate.
