The Spirit Of The Age

Ecologist, The, July, 2000 by Fred Pearce

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.