This article was first published on Medium. ‘Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: “I seek the living Earth! I seek our planet, with…
This article was first published in The Ecologist. Theresa May has called an election allegedly to secure her ‘mandate’ for a hard Brexit – although in practice it is difficult not to see this as cynical party political maneuver to…
By Victor Anderson and Rupert Read. This article was first published in The Ecologist. The triggering of Article 50 earlier this week starts a new phase in the arguments about Brexit. The various negotiations that are now going to take…
By Rupert Read and Deepak Rughani. This article was first published in The Ecologist. There is a mission brewing and building, a mission that needs all hands that are ready: To bring the ‘un-named movement’ – the ‘for-life’ story of…
This article was first published in The Ecologist. At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril…
This article was first published on Medium. You can also watch a lightly-edited version of my ‘welcoming address’ to new 1st year students at the University of East Anglia on YouTube. Welcome to University! Welcome to perhaps the most amazing…
By Ian Webb, David Baumslag and Rupert Read. This article was first published in Bank Underground. One September morning, the Lord Mayor of London was called to inspect a fire that had recently started in the City. Believing that it…
This article was first published in UEA. What is the Precautionary Principle? The Precautionary Principle states that where any action has the potential to cause widespread harm, the burden of proof concerning the absence of harm falls on those advocating…
This article was first published in The Ecologist. Electoral democracy has largely failed. It has been captured by big corporates, suborned and crudified (de-deliberationised) by the corporate media, and sidelined by neoliberal globalisation (and the consequent minute-by-minute power of ‘the…
This article was first published in The Ecologist. Robotisation is probably going to be a temporary phenomenon: planetary limits will (within a generation or at most two) severely limit the supplies of raw materials and energy needed to enable large-scale…
By Helena Norberg-Hodge and Rupert Read. This article was first published in The Ecologist. The election of Donald Trump was a rude awakening from which many people in the US have still not recovered. Their shock is similar to that…
This article was first published in The Ecologist. If we’ve learned anything from politics over the past year, it’s that the era of two party politics seems to have crashed into a long-overdue end. We are now faced with a…