Expelled from Eden and adrift amid the miracles of modern living, going back to nature is the only way to stay sane and healthy in this mad, bad world, says Fergus Drennan
Economist Herman E Daly argues that our future depends on a new economic model, one that needs to be defined by the dynamic balance – the steady state – of the natural world upon which it depends.
The corporate market has become the institutional equivalent of a compulsive eater. It has a built-in hunger that cannot be filled, and it is hard to stop the damage within the framework of its own game.
The British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) will this week call for for a five-year £8m research programme to save the insect from colony collapse disorder (CCD).
Recent reports of catastrophic declines in bee populations have had scientists buzzing around looking for a plausible explanation. Is it mites? Is it GM crops? Is it mobile phones or habitat loss? It's all of these things, says Pat Thomas, but it's also so much more than that.
'I can tell you what farm every cow came from, how long it's been in the family, where it's been killed and if it had a name.' Laura Sevier meets an inspirational Orcadian food supplier
As the bluetongue virus sinks its teeth into British livestock, there is one appalling certainty: like the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and foot-and-mouth before it, some farmers will see no way out, and take their own lives. Farmers in Britain are the profession second most likely to commit suicide (after, bizarrely, dentistry).
Deep in rural Sussex at Wakehurst Place, in a large nature reserve of 500 acres of National Trust woodlands and lakes, stands the Kew Gardens Biological Research Centre. Sixty feet beneath is a nuclear bunker. This is the British National Doomsday vault, home to the UK’s Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). If apocalyptic disaster strikes, this bunker will hold key bio-scientists and all remaining plant life.
Two critical markets are pursuing a stressed planet’s renewable resources, presenting policymakers with complex and difficult choices. The Worldwatch Institute’s latest look at Earth’s “vital signs” sees dangerous times ahead as the “sustainability crisis” unfolds. China Dialogue's Maryann Bird investigates
The Environment Agency (EA) is within weeks of letting Monsanto escape its liability for dumping thousands of tonnes of cancer-causing chemicals – including all the ingredients of the DDT defoliant Agent Orange – in two quarries in Wales.
Last December's Barker Review replaces democracy with economic growth. Ex <i>Ecologis</i>t editor Simon Fairlie claims our land is being sold to the highest bidder
Plant fuels can never meet our current and growing energy needs and, as Robin Maynard reports, adopting a ‘carbohydrate economy’ may prove disastrous for our farmers, our food supply and our future
Sir Nicholas Stern was asked to find out what way of averting climate change was economically feasible. A loaded question that has allowed him to find a perverse solution to a fatal problem.
By radically changing the way we acquire our food, the development of agriculture has condemned us to live worse than ever before. Not only that, agriculture has led to the first significant instances of large-scale war, inequality, poverty, crime, famine and human induced climate change and mass extinction.
By Clive W. Dennis (winner of the Ecologist/Coady International Institute 2006 Essay Competition)
In the penultimate extract from Fatal Harvest’s demolition of agribusiness disinformation, The Ecologist assesses the claim that biotechnology will solve industrial agriculture’s ills.
Today, while hunger stunts the lives of hundreds of millions of people, grassroots movements in Kenya and Brazil are winning the war on want. Frances Moore Lappé investigates
