Articles (Ecologist)

Don’t believe everything you hear or read, warns Pat Thomas. There really isn’t an agricultural bright side to rising levels of CO2.

Biological rocket fuel they may be, but ‘sports’ drinks can be a danger to health in the long term. Pat Thomas reports. A stalwart of the UK soft drinks market, Lucozade has been around since 1938 and has dominated the UK market for much of that time. Having successfully distanced itself from a traditional image […]

‘We’d really like a woman to talk about this,’ said the researcher from BBC2’s The Daily Politics show. I marvelled that TV was even more crass behind the scenes than on screen, and wondered did they perhaps imagine me wearing my pinny and brandishing a rolling pin, like Hilda Ogden? Or with cleavage a-popping and […]

While nothing says holistic living like a nice candle, that warm glow may be hiding a toxic secret, warns Pat Thomas. Most of us are aware of the health effects of combustion by-products from major outdoor sources, such as cars and power plants, and even from obvious indoor sources such as stoves. Few are aware […]

This thing that we call ‘reality’ has suddenly become much more complex. As the challenges of global warming come at us thick and fast, we are daily coming face to face with our very human limitations in terms of our capacity to order the world around us. We are also forced to acknowledge the limitations […]

Your recycled loo paper may be soft, strong and very, very long, but is it really all that green? Pat Thomas gets to the bottom of an issue of convenience. Go on. Imagine life without toilet paper. Or really any of the household paper products we use every day; products we use, largely without thinking, […]

Doesn’t time fly? Almost exactly a year ago, the Stern Review into climate change studied three scenarios for a world being driven by climate change: business as usual, stabilising CO2 at 450ppm and stabilising it at 500-550ppm. At 450ppm we had a 50-50 chance of avoiding the 2ºC temperature rise that would send the polar […]

From synthetic fibres to lethal dioxins, some sanitary products are a lot less innocent than those glossy television ads would have women believe. Pat Thomas reports. Increased absorbency. Odour neutralising. Improved leak protection. Women’s reproductive lives have always been seen as a series of problems to be solved, and the world of tampon marketing is […]

Only a year ago I would have said that the day of the protest was largely dead. It seemed that people were too overwhelmed or scared or bored or depressed to take action. That in failing to say ‘no’ to the things that destroy our world they were also failing to say ‘yes’ to the […]

To understand the way climate change is going to affect our health and wellbeing, maybe we need to start looking at the smaller picture, argues Pat thomas Earlier this year, a team of British scientists announced that they had found the key to halting the spread of malaria, a disease that kills more than a […]