The Spirit Of The Age

Ecologist, The, July, 2000 by 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 he 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.

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.

BLUEPRINT 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 Limit 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.