Britain has a serious and unnecessary drug habit, but the implications of our pill-forevery-ill culture go far beyond the adverse effects on human health. The complex chemicals in modern pharmaceuticals, as well as the manufacturing processes involved, leave a massive industrial footprint on the natural world that is largely ignored by both science and government.
I slept in my clothes last night, on the bare wooden floor of one of the houses the first boatload of people to be evacuated from the Carteret Islands are building for their families. It was a jet-black night in the small clearing hacked out amid the jungle, the dark broken only by our two candles and the lights of Fireflies jigging in the trees.
This budget season, and so a short perambulation around the vexed question of the national debt seems in order. As a nation we've been living with debt for more the 300 years now, since 1694 to be precise, when Scottish privateer William Paterson persuaded the government of the time that creating £1.2 million of IOUs would get them out of their spending difficulties.
Somebody somewhere has to have a cunning plan to fix our environmental problems and save the world – right? Jim Thomas sorts through the big tech ideas you’ll be reading about this year
Uncontrolled growth of financial debt is currently laying waste to large parts of the global economy. An explosion of ecological debt looks set to do the same, but worse, to a biosphere friendly to human civilisation.
Experts have identified something called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. No, not a symptom of excessive alcohol intake, but rather the theory that people’s perception of the environment is based on what they can see with their own eyes today, not what things were like in the past.
High-street fashion at bargain prices, charity shops are the ethical way to accentuate a wardrobe. All you need is a sense of adventure… By Laura Sevier
Last month my friend Satish Kumar said in Sustained magazine that the happiest people are those who live close to the land and use their hands – craftspeople and farmers. As a naturalist, keen gardener and soon-to-be vegetable-plot devotee, this resonates with me.
Food safety campaigners have reacted angrily to a refusal by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to ban controversial plastic additive Bisphenol A (BPA), which is present in some food packaging and containers.
