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Date Published: 22/06/00
Author: Fred Pearce It is exactly 30 years since The Ecologist first waved its campaigning fist at the self-destructive tendencies of mankind. Much has been achieved since then; but much remains to be done. To open our anniversary special on the events and effects of the last – and next – three decades, Fred Pearce traces the magazine’s history, successes, conflicts and influence. |
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In a world where even saving the planet can be made to sound mundane – a matter of switching off the lights and recycling old cans – 'The Ecologist,' in its 30 years of fitful, fretful existence has always offered the wider picture, the apocalyptic vision and the intellectual pyrotechnics. It has championed big causes and made big enemies. Why take on mere governments when you can broadside the World Bank? Why tackle humble ecosystems when the real subject is Gaia herself?
The spider at the centre of this web throughout has been founder, publisher and sometime editor Edward, better known as Teddy, Goldsmith. His origins explain much about the eclectic and uncompromising makeup of the magazine.
The Goldschmidts were for centuries one of Europe’s second-league banking families – poor cousins of the Rothschilds. In the late 19th century, Adolf Goldschmidt, grandfather of Teddy, came to Britain, bought an estate in Suffolk and set about becoming British. His son Frank went into politics, becoming, by 1910, the Conservative MP for Stowmarket. But anti-German hysteria at the start of the First World War forced him abroad where he ran a string of French hotels, and met a girl from the Auvergne called Marcelle Moullier, who became the mother of Teddy and his brother, the future financier James.
Back in England, Teddy sporadically studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford before becoming disillusioned with the subject. He began a long period of reading and travelling the world alone or with his friend Jack Aspinall, during which his own highly personal world view was forged. Aspinall and Teddy shared a love of the primitive. Aspinall divided his time between his London gambling club and collecting animals for his zoo, Howletts near Canterbury. Meanwhile, Teddy’s enthusiasms turned to anthropology. In the 1960s he served on the committee that founded the Primitive Peoples’ Fund, which later became Survival International.
But he was developing ‘green’ views, too. ‘I began to realise that survival of primitive peoples and of the environment were inseparable. Primitive people were disappearing; so was wildlife. I realised that the root problem was economic development. So I decided to start a paper to explore these issues.’
THE ECOLOGIST IS BORN
Goldsmith launched 'The Ecologist' in 1970 on a wave of concern for the fate of the planet. Rachel Carson had published her seminal book on pesticides, 'Silent Spring'; British economist Barbara Ward had coined the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth’ in an equally influential work on the links between economics and the environment; in California biologist Paul Ehrlich had just brought out his controversial tract, 'The Population Bomb.' The first issue of 'The Ecologist' fizzed with these issues and many more. Its cover showed a man drowning in a sea of rubble, reaching out for a lifeline. Its main features covered themes that would become familiar to regular readers.
There was the anthropological ‘survival’ strand, with Robert Allen reporting on Eskimos and the Alaskan oil boom, while predicting the Exxon Valdez pollution disaster of two decades later. Toxins featured in stories on the dangers of the drugs pumped into modern farm animals and on radiation being released into the atmosphere, with its warning of a Chernobyl-like disaster. There were two pieces on the number-one fear of the time: the population explosion. One, by Michael Allaby, asked ‘can we avoid a world famine?’ It concluded that the only way out was to reduce the world’s population by at least a half.
Goldsmith himself wrote a piece entitled ‘Cybernetics, society and the ecosystem’, drawing together some of the ideas that nine years later formed the heart of James Lovelock’s first book on Gaia, in which he postulated that the planet’s biosphere operated as a single self-sustaining organism.
BLUE PRINT FOR SURVIVAL
The magazine hit the ground running. Within months it had carried a long tract called 'A Blueprint for Survival,' written by Goldsmith and Allen, which was later published as a book, selling three-quarters of a million copies in seventeen languages. The money kept 'The Ecologist,' whose own sales were poor, afloat for many years. It was a full-throated call for a new world order founded on zero growth, stable populations and the kind of small, self-sufficient communities that Goldsmith had seen in traditional societies on his travels.
In the years immediately before the first global oil crisis in 1974, the world’s post-war economic juggernaut seemed unstoppable. But the 'Blueprint,' and a similar manifesto to emerge in the US called 'The Limits to Growth,' were the first detailed articulations of a new vision. And they hit the mood of growing eco-angst – appearing as both Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were established, as governments in the US, Britain and elsewhere set up the first environment agencies, and in the run-up to the 1972 Stockholm Environment Conference – the first Earth Summit.
The 'Blueprint' gained widespread support from such influential figures as Sir Julian Huxley and Peter Scott. Goldsmith was invited to meet Britain’s first environment secretary Peter Walker to discuss the implications. ‘At the time, we genuinely believed that if politicians were alerted to what was happening to the planet, they would do something about it,’ Goldsmith says now. He is no longer so trusting.
The 'Blueprint' called for the formation of a ‘Movement for Survival.’ This led directly to the creation in Britain of the People Party, later renamed the Ecology Party and later still the Green Party. Goldsmith stood for the People Party in his father’s old Suffolk constituency in the 1974 general election, campaigning against industrial agriculture with a camel supplied by Aspinall that bore a sandwich board reading ‘No deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith’. He lost his deposit.
Sensing the tide turning against them, Goldsmith and the Ecologist team retreated from London to a group of small Cornish farm cottages – a small, largely self-contained community from where the magazine sought to practise what it preached.
THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
Inevitably, there were feuds. Michael Allaby, who joined Goldsmith in Cornwall as managing editor, remembers: ‘Over the months that followed I found it increasingly difficult to work with Teddy. There were many rows. I disagreed with more and more of his views.’ There was an article by Robert Allen that appeared to support Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a dispute about Darwinian evolution and more.
According to Peter Bunyard – who besides Teddy is the one person to have contributed editorially to the magazine throughout its life – many of the rows related to ‘Teddy’s deterministic adherence to the notion that traditional societies alone have the key to sustainable living’. But Goldsmith’s unshakeable belief on this point was the grit in the oyster. And other later-influential figures joined to replace those lost. Nick Hildyard, for instance, who worked full-time for the magazine for 20 years, much of that time as editor, arrived after being inspired when Goldsmith and his team visited his school to discuss the 'Blueprint.'
The test for any magazine with radical pretensions is not its ideological purity, or whether its determination to pursue its radicalism lures it into occasional unhealthy alliances. The test is whether it becomes a place where new ideas can flourish and find expression. And, when the time comes, whether it can renew itself. Here 'The Ecologist' has been spectacularly successful.
GETTING THERE FIRST
Graham Searle, founder of Friends of the Earth in the UK and an early associate editor, was able to say on the magazine’s 20th anniversary in 1990 that the early editions ‘contained virtually all the issues we are talking about now’. He might have added that it was by then full of many ideas that Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and others would only latch onto far into the 1990s.
For any environmental journalist, myself included, a rummage through 30 years of the magazine is a salutary experience. Global warming, the destruction of rainforests, the politics of seeds and genetic modification, the economics of nuclear power, the lethal impacts of large dams, the apparent impossibility of reforming the World Bank – all are topics on which 'The Ecologist' ranged far and wide years before the rest of us caught up.
It was discussing climate change during the African droughts of the mid-1970s, at least 10 years before the topic became common currency. The world woke up to the crisis in the world’s rainforests in the late 1980s, but look through 'The Ecologist' and you find a cover feature entitled ‘Who’s destroying the rainforests – peasants or profits?’ back in 1982. Not only had it identified a critical global problem, it had tied down a central dilemma in addressing it.
Or take the issue of large dams. For many years environmentalists had liked dams. They appeared to be temples of clean, renewable energy. They provided water for the ‘greening of the deserts’. A few lovers of wilderness shed tears over the loss of a particularly beautiful valley beneath a reservoir. But wider environmental and social issues were barely discussed. Until, that is, Goldsmith and Hildyard went to work.
It was around 1980 that Goldsmith, during one of his periodic bouts of wanderlust, stumbled on plans to flood valleys in Sri Lanka for a complex of hydroelectric dams known as the Mahaweli scheme. He was appalled at the destructive folly of it. ‘These dams destroy so much in return for a few decades of electricity,’ he said later. ‘I came back from Sri Lanka determined to fight such projects.’
And he did, to immense effect. Over the next four years, he and Hildyard commissioned an extraordinary series of papers from around the world on the social and environmental impacts of large dams. What emerged was a picture that previously very few had even suspected – that most dams in most places at most times do more harm than good, using State power to steal the ecological wealth of rivers from poor, rural communities and redistribute it to the rich, urban and landed. In case after case, the academic contributors demonstrated the scale of environmental destruction affecting the lives of millions of people, the spread of disease and corruption and the unfulfilled promises of the engineers.
Goldsmith and Hildyard underlined these themes in a three-volume book published in 1985, which became a seminal text for what has become a worldwide movement to oppose large dams. As Phil Williams, a hydrologist from California, put it in his introduction to 'The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams': "Dams transform the social life of a country, destroying indigenous, traditional cultures and accelerating the change to a cash economy centred on cities… The promise of radically changing a country’s economy is frequently used to justify the destruction of communities, ecosystems and traditional agricultural systems."
This analysis is now accepted wisdom in the environment movement. But 20 years ago, it was not. And it was the energy and single-mindedness of The Ecologist's critique that set the new paradigm. Many 1990s campaigners against dams on the Narmada in India or the Three Gorges mega-project in China, US greens working to tear down old dams in the mid-west, and British opponents of the Ilisu dam on the River Tigris in Turkey, will be unaware that in all probability none of this would have happened but for The Ecologist’s pioneering work.
ECO-NOMICS
The Ecologist has also been remarkably good with its economics. It got dams right. It also long argued the case that nuclear power made no economic sense. ‘We exposed the fallacy of cheap nuclear power and anticipated the City’s analysis by eight years,’ says Bunyard. Emboldened, it attempted a similar destabilising act on the World Bank itself. Many environmental and other groups, anxious not to be seen as opponents of economic development in poor countries, continued for many years to try and seduce the bank into greener ways. 'The Ecologist,' having no truck with the conventional development agenda, had no time for its agencies either. It broke with the post-war economic consensus of the World Bank and IMF, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the rest long before most greens.
‘Development may be designed to combat poverty,’ Goldsmith wrote. ‘But it is in fact creating poverty. The main cause of poverty today is environmental degradation caused by economic development. Most people who live in the world’s great slums and shanty towns are development refugees.’ Only at the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle last year did many environmentalists catch up with that analysis.
The magazine thundered in an open letter to the World Bank’s President Barber Conable in 1987: ‘More than half of the inhabitants of the third world live outside the market system. Such people you cannot and never will be able to help. All you can do is further impoverish them by financing projects that must deprive them of their basic resources, such as the natural forests, fertile land and uncontaminated water.’ Goldsmith’s authority, which by now included many friends on Capitol Hill, ensured that the Bank’s President replied in detail, knowing full well that the magazine would print a withering riposte on the facing page.
It was not just the Bank. Globalisation was emerging as the real target of The Ecologist. It was the unifying theme behind opposition to nuclear power and the green revolution, world trade and large dams, deforestation and consumerism. And the anti-globalisation agenda also helped the magazine to declare as bogus the arguments of other greens. Some, for instance, became seduced by ‘green consumerism’ in the late 1980s – on the back of the runaway success of a now-forgotten book, The Green Consumer Guide. The Ecologist had no truck. ‘Underlying the current green consumer boom,’ it wrote in 1989, ‘is the idea that with careful housekeeping, we can somehow have our cake and eat it. [This is] no different to a belief in perpetual motion.’
CHANGING TIMES
The Ecologist has always taken itself very seriously. By and large it has been right to do so. Its fire, intellectual verve and occasional fanaticism are almost unique in British journalism. But such serious purpose can create problems.
Some, for example, have found that Goldsmith’s lifelong search in print for a ‘bio-ethic’ has sometimes got in the way of the campaigns. Bunyard puts it best. ‘Teddy sees wisdom and purpose in the universe and that in a series of nested levels the purpose of the parts is to shore up and maintain the whole. Hence the need for a stable family to shore up the community, and the community the environment of which it is part. Such a way of thinking upsets those post-modernists who muddy the waters with their cultural relativism.’
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, this theme became increasingly at odds with Hildyard’s emerging agenda on ‘Third World’ development, in which he sought hard to make the magazine serve progressive community groups round the world and to give them a voice. He embraced feminism and fought racism. He was proud that its offices became the temporary headquarters of the Twyford Down anti-motorway protesters, while still helping to sustain anti-logging tribespeople in the Borneo rainforests and anti-dam protesters in India.
‘It took me a long time to realise the power the magazine had and to use it in a way that is sensitive to the needs of movement building,’ he says today. ‘We never went for newspaper headlines – no doubt to the detriment of sales.’
For some this earnestness made the magazine boring. It could be. It could also trigger conflict. And after many years of working together, Hildyard and Goldsmith’s diverging political views made it inevitable that at some stage they would part. That parting came in mid-1997, when Hildyard and fellow editor Sarah Sexton left the magazine, claiming irreconcilable differences with Teddy Goldsmith.
STILL STANDING
The magazine is now in the process of being reborn – as all magazines must. Its cover rubric says it is ‘rethinking basic assumptions’. It looks more like a conventional monthly magazine. It even has a science editor – the evergreen Peter Bunyard. But that is not to say scientists get an easier ride. Especially cancer scientists. Ask their doyen Sir Richard Doll, a pioneer in identifying links between smoking and lung cancer. His assertions that environmental pollution is a minor cause of cancer earned him the epithets ‘defender of corporate interests’ and ‘questionable pillar of the cancer establishment’. He responded by calling The Ecologist ‘a child’s fiction magazine’.
The magazine has noticeably returned to the warpath on issues of immediacy to its European and American readers, including the toxic threats of life such as dioxin and radiation, while retreating as a mouthpiece for development issues in the poor world. But the eclecticism remains. Recent features include ‘Maori Religion and the natural world’, ‘The Cosmic Covenant’, ‘The madness of nuclear energy’ and ‘In bed with Dr Jack [Cunningham].’
But some things don’t change. The estimable Richard Willson still does the cartoons. Indian radical green feminist Vandana Shiva may now be a star name writer, her name emblazoned on the cover - but it was The Ecologist in its less headline-grabbing days, that gave Shiva the column inches to become a fully-fledged mainstream pundit.
And even disgruntled ex-editors have been quick to praise recent coverage of climate change and the ‘headline-grabbing’ Monsanto Files, which pursued the company’s record through a checklist of issues from Agent Orange and PCBs to herbicides, genetic engineering and ‘terminator’ seeds. The investigation resulted in an issue so caustic that big magazine distributors refused to handle it. Its uncompromising opening lines: ‘Genetic engineering threatens to upset the Earth’s ecological balance, and to undermine the livelihoods of millions of people around the world. It is a technology that is almost entirely controlled by a handful of giant transnational corporations, and its effects are often irreversible’ could have come out of any era of the magazine’s past.
Indeed, the new Ecologist looks remarkably like the 1970s version with a design and journalistic makeover. The magazine that has championed rickshaws and the Khmer Rouge, Zulus and Gaia, peasants and feminism, sterilisation and rainforest rubber tappers, is not done yet.
Fred Pearce is a regular contributor to New Scientist and a long-time reader of The Ecologist.
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