Howl at the Moon HOME ON EARTH FOR
JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND CAMPAIGNER 

Pat Thomas

Articles (A Bigger Conversation)

This archive of investigations, reports and interviews below spans from my work with What Doctors Don’t Tell you through my ‘Ecologist years’ to some of my more recent work (see also my Blogs page) with other publications and from the NYR Natural News website, which I edit and Beyond GM campaign and its associated websites.

It does not include the large body of feature work which I did as a music journalist – work I am equally proud of but which came before the internet made archiving easier!

What Doctors Don’t Tell you re-wrote the book on how journalists should approach health. Instead of rewriting press releases, blindly following the latest fads or relying on rent-a-quote experts, the team immersed itself in the medical journalist that Doctors were – or should have been  – reading. These often tell a very different story to the PR that filters through to the media about modern pharmaceuticals.  I was a contributing editor at WDDTY for nearly a decade and editor of Proof! – the consumer magazine that grew out of the work we did there.

The Ecologist magazine, founded in 1970, was the world’s oldest and most widely read environment magazine. It was a driving force in major environmental campaigns against climate change, toxic chemicals in household products, rainforest destruction, food additives, genetic modification and much more. Its courageous, in-depth journalism provided early-warning signs for all the environmental challenges we face now and was, for decades, hugely influential in setting the environmental and green political agendas in the UK and elsewhere. The New York Review of Magazines called it “A magazine that changes people’s lives”. I was privileged to be its Health Editor and then Editor for several years before it ceased printing in 2009 and have continued to contribute ad hoc to it’s website.

My interest in a less interventionist, more natural approach to health continues to this day. NYR Natural News is the only alternative health website based in the UK. It has a growing UK and international audience of people who want good information on health alternatives and who want to understand the connections between environment and health. It is also an increasingly powerful voice in environment and GM campaigning, exposing the toxic connections between multinational corporations and political policy and their impact on human well-being.



17 May 2019

Rewriting Nature?

Synthetic biology – altering or redesigning genes to meet human objectives – is a fast-developing field. So far mostly applied in agriculture and medicine, synthetic biology could have substantial knock-on effects on conservation – including modified genes spreading to non-target species and affecting broader ecosystems. But, according to a new report Genetic Frontiers for Conservation […]

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02 Mar 2019

Are Gene-edited Animals Drugs?

How do we regulate gene-edited animals? It’s not a new question but it’s one that is gaining urgency as biotechnology companies turn their attention to intentional alterations in animal genomes. This week, in a comment published this week on The Conversation and quickly picked up by Newsweek and multiple other outlets, the question was posed: […]

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