the late environmentalist, author, & philosopher
There is an increasing tendency to blame human ills – physical and psychological – on ‘defective’ genes. But is it our genes that are defective? Or is it rather the pathological environment in which we live? Deprived of community, eating nutritionally impoverished foods, surrounded by industrial pollution . . . the raw conditions of life [...]
Edward Goldsmith shows how the barely-restrained pollution of the chemical and nuclear industries are to blame for the growth of cancer. Unpublished article, written 9 September 1997. See also Cancer: are the experts lying? I once spent the night at the flat of a friend of mine in Paris. He worked for a somewhat shady [...]
Letter in the Sunday Telegraph, 31st August, 1997. Professor Sir Richard Doll, Britain’s leading expert on the epidemiology of cancer, whose letter you published last week, insists that the incidence of the disease is falling. But he also insists (in each case against all the evidence) that asbestos does not cause lung cancer and that [...]
Edward Goldsmith on how Sir James’s death from cancer might have been prevented. This article was published in the Sunday Telegraph, 3 August 1997. A fortnight ago my brother, Jimmy Goldsmith, died of cancer. His courage was absolutely indomitable. But how can his loss not make me angry? We will never know for sure the [...]
“Cancer is now a disease that afflicts one out of three people, and everybody knows in their hearts, and also on the basis of countless studies, what one of the main causes are: exposure to carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and ionising radiation – from medical X-rays, nuclear tests and radioactive emissions from nuclear plants.”
A review of Health and the global environment by Ross Hume Hall. Polity Press, London 1990. Twenty years ago, our task was to establish the exact nature of the environmental problems that confronted us and to work out how best they could be solved. This task has now been largely achieved. We do not know [...]
Published as Chapter 7 of The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams: Volume 1. Overview. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, Worthyvale Manor Camelford, Cornwall PL32 9TT, UK, 1984. By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard. « previous chapter · contents · next chapter » Introduction When a river is dammed and a large artificial lake is created, those forms [...]
Modern health services have failed to deliver the promised goods, argues Edward Goldsmith. He attributes this failure to the “chemical warfare” approach to treating disease and our decision, as a society, to subordinate health needs to the imperatives of the economy and industry. It was originally published in The Ecologist Vol. 10 Nos. 6–7, July-September [...]
