the late environmentalist, author, & philosopher
Articles published in The Ecologist
Peter Bunyard, a long standing friend and colleague of Teddy’s, offers his personal tribute. Written on 28 August 2009. A shorter version of this article was published on The Ecologist website. Teddy died on August 21st, in Tuscany, in his hill-top house, a converted convent, which overlooked one of his favourite places in all the [...]
This brief review of A Blueprint for Survival by Mark Anslow was published in The Ecologist, July 2007, in the “Classic book club” section – “Revisiting the books that shaped the environmental movement”. Reading A Blueprint for Survival written by Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith [with Robert Allen and colleagues], is at once incredibly refreshing and [...]
Having launched The Ecologist 37 years ago, Teddy Goldsmith has been instrumental in everything from the setting up of the world’s first political green party to being the first to expose many of the problems associated with global development, such as giant dams and nuclear power. Now 79, he is as vociferous as ever, but [...]
Does economic development reduce or increase poverty? Does it benefit the countries of the Third World or the corporations of the West? Is it irreconcilable with finite natural resources? Or would its opponents simply condemn billions to lives that are nasty, brutal and short? Clare Short and Teddy Goldsmith discuss. Teddy Goldsmith is the founder [...]
Edward Goldsmith interviews Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who risked everything to challenge GM giant Monsanto. Interview conducted on 1 May 2004. Background: For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Usually, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In [...]
Modern agriculture is not only highly vulnerable to climate change, it is also a major cause of climate change due to its emissions of greenhouse gases and its damaging effects on soil and freshwater resources. A combination of traditional agricultural knowledge and techniques, combined with newly emerging sustainable technologies, may hold the answers we need. [...]
Modern moral philosophers have tended to study ethics in a void, ignoring the insights of the natural and human sciences. Although several of our most noted and thoughtful biologists and sociologists have sought to correct this, they have based their ethical principles on a grossly distorted view of nature and human society. The result has [...]
Thirty years ago, the same year as the first Environment Summit (the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment) in Stockholm, The Ecologist published A Blueprint for Survival. Now, on the eve of Johannesburg, the magazine’s founding editor Edward Goldsmith asks why, in the face of mounting environmental crises, nothing has changed. Published in The [...]
