Service and collaboration: Berry Landcare volunteer, international medic appointed AM

But Bill Pigott is not one of those motorists.

Carpeting the earth berms is a range of native grasses, local to the Shoalhaven area.

The former international medic with the World Health Organisation was part of the Landcare group that pushed contractor Fulton Hogan and Transport for NSW to source local seedlings and seeds for the project, as well as ensuring environmental offsets remained local.

"We've now got some beautiful acreages of native trees being looked after as part of a biodiversity offset for the highway," he said.

"Those are little things but when I look at them, I think, wow, that's a legacy we leave."

For his volunteer work with Landcare, as well as his medical work in Cambodia and Nepal and subsequent medical education, Mr Pigott has been appointed a member of the order of Australia in this year's King's Birthday honours.

While the two parts of his career local Landcare volunteering and work for an international medical organisation, may seem at polar opposites, for Mr Pigott they are two sides of the same coin.

What connects them both is a spirit of service, and an ethos of collaboration.

"My view of the crisis that we're in is a failure to collaborate," he said.

"We compete, we bludgeon each other with command and control attitudes. We don't pause and maybe take a look at what nature does, because nature collaborates and we don't learn from that and collaborate with each other and find strength in doing things together."

Living in Berry since his retirement, Mr Pigott has been involved in local Landcare groups for over two decades, and has watched the regrowth of endangered Illawarra subtropical rainforest in pockets of the area, while also tending to a small amount on his own property.

It is there while having his morning coffee before they get to work that the now 82-year-old has had time to reflect on the work that he and his fellow volunteers have been doing, as well as the teams he collaborated with around the world.

"It's not just the growing of trees, weeding and things like that, but it's understanding the sense that Indigenous people share with us of what it means to be on Country," he said.

"If you are in the forest you are part of the forest process. All the CO2 that we breathe out is being taken in by the trees, turned into carbon, and what are they doing with our CO2? They're turning it into chlorophyll and giving us oxygen to breathe.

"So we are part of them and they are part of us.

"As you get older, and approach the end of life, that is a wonderful concept."