You can ‘structurally adjust’ an economy in a matter of years, but it takes longer to destroy a culture. Heiner Thiessen reports from Senegal on the impact of imposing a Western cash economy on a traditional African barter society
In the second part of our adaptation of Fatal Harvest’s iconoclastic analysis of agribusiness propaganda, The Ecologist reveals the real cost of industrial food.
We interrupt our regular programming for
a moral advisory... My country's war on the natural world parallels its war on that other silent Other, namely people who live far enough away to have their own God, to avoid our products, to traffic about in robes and dark skin.
Opinionated and outspoken, often wildly at odds with the government’s line, the UK’s environment minister Michael Meacher is, by his own reckoning, a lone voice in the wilderness.
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
‘Immortal’ and created solely to amass ever larger amounts of wealth, limited-liability corporations institutionalise dissatisfaction. They are, Derrick Jensen writes, the economic manifestation of the Buddhist notion of ‘hungry ghosts’ – spirits that roam the earth, always eating, never sated.
Shrimp has always been associated with the small and the puny. Why then is this seemingly harmless crustacean inspiring angry protests throughout the developing world, and why have so many people died as a result? Dr Mike Shanahan investigates
This month a construction consortium will start pouring millions of tons of rock and cement into the Venice Lagoon – one of the Mediterranean’s most important wetlands. The consortium claims the dam project will ‘save’ the city from flooding. But the project failed its environmental impact assessment, threatens the ecology of the lagoon and – with global warming and rising sea-levels –may not even protect Venice anyway. Tony Zamparutti reports from Italy.
Grandmother Earth - Thirteen matriarchs from indigenous cultures are currently touring the world, promoting peace, unity and a respect for nature. nicola Graydon meets one of them, Mona Polacca
Public money to the tune of £131,000 has been spent on a report that claims to have found farmers ‘upbeat’ about genetic modification – despite its authors having interviewed only 30 farmers, half of whom had already grown GM crops.
Ever since the 1970s we have lived with the growing awareness that our ecosystem is fragile and the perpetual exploitation of our natural resources impossible. By the late 1980s, even The Sun newspaper had its own green correspondent. Everything we buy, use and throw away has an impact somewhere on the ecological continuum, and nowadays the most bullish Western consumers’ consciences are regularly punctured by shards of eco-worry. We also increasingly realise that working ever harder for more possessions, more options, more stuff, doesn’t tend to make us more content.
Who said these words: ‘The environmental movement is a growing force in civil society, searching for a home in mainstream politics. The party that succeeds will be the natural party of government’? It wasn’t George Monbiot, Tony Juniper or Jonathon Porritt. It was David Miliband, in December 2006.
