the late environmentalist, author, & philosopher
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Most environmental education in our schools and Universities remains rooted in apparently value-free ‘scientific’ knowledge. However modern science has been powerfully instrumental in shaping our minds to accept the worldview of industrialism, and the replacement of the living biosphere with the dysfunctional artificial ‘technosphere’ that is the inevitable if unplanned product of industrialism. Unpublished, 1985, [...]
Dear Mr Clausen, This double issue of The Ecologist has been prepared in order to expose to world leaders the role played by your bank and the other international agencies with which you work, in particular the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), in creating the present escalation of human misery, malnutrition [...]
Review of The Double-Edged Helix: Science and the Real World, Liebe F Cavalieri, Columbia University Press, New York, 1981 This book is part of the ‘Convergence’ series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. 193 pages including index In the introduction to The Double-Edged Helix, Ruth Nanda Anshen tells us why she created the ‘Convergence’ series of [...]
Ecology, so as to be made scientifically respectable and also compatible with the paradigm of modernism, has become reductionistic, mechanistic and quantified. To achieve this has meant seeking to discredit the basic principles of ecology, formulated by the great early ecologists such as Thoreau, Clements and Shelford. One such basic principle is that of ‘ecological [...]
Book Review: Ecology of Tropical Plants, by Margaret L. Vickery. John Wiley & Sons 1984. Published in The Ecologist Vol. 15 No. 3, March 1985. This is a short textbook – an adaptation, as the author indicates, for tropical regions, of R. F. Daubenmire’s Plants and Environment – a Textbook of Autecology. Margaret Vickery regards [...]
Development is the principal agent of hunger, argues Edward Goldsmith. He puts forward the case for a totally different kind of agricultural policy From International Agricultural Development, May 1985 The basic thesis underlying world food policy is that hunger is the consequence of poverty. People starve because they are poor. Make them rich, via economic [...]
Book Review: Insects on Plants: community patterns and mechanisms by D. R. Strong PhD, J. H. Lawton PhD, Sir Richard Southwood PhD, DSc, FRS. Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1984. Published in The Ecologist Vol. 15 No. 3, May 1985. The authors consider that the study of how various phytophagous (plant eating) insects colonise different plants under [...]
The World Bank has suspended, on environmental grounds, a loan of $256 million for the Polonoroeste [road building and rainforest clearing] Project in Brazilian Amazonia. But the Bank’s President, Alden W. Clausen, continues to “worship at the altar of economic pragmatism”. Published in The Ecologist Vol. 15 No. 4, July–August 1985. The World Bank has [...]
