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

Pat Thomas

Articles (Organic Consumers Association)

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.



05 Nov 2020

CRISPR GMOs―They’re Cheap and Fast, But Are They Good?

This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to two scientists―Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna―“who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.” According to the Nobel Prize committee the “genetic scissors” of CRISPR “have […]

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02 Apr 2020

Coronavirus – What are the Best Alternatives for Self-Care?

The global spread of coronavirus/COVID-19 has sent researchers and scientists into overdrive to find both treatments and cures. In the meantime, doctors and other practitioners are, to a large extent, improvising. They are employing best-care practices for the very sick in hospital and providing best-guess advice for those with mild symptoms who are self-isolating, and […]

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16 Jan 2020

Save the Planet — By Destroying Farming?

In a hall filled to the rafters with agroecological farmers, a man approaches the podium. Most already know what he’s going to say, but they’ve come to listen anyway—only half believing that what they’ve seen and heard about his assault on farming and farmers could be accurate. George Monbiot is a journalist and author specializing […]

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08 Jan 2020

Brave New World: What You Need to Know About Gene-Edited Farm Animals

These days, without most people being aware of it, genetic engineering is spreading from the crops in the field to the animals in the barn.

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12 Nov 2019

Factory Farmed Turkeys—Nothing to be Thankful For

Thanksgiving dinner means only one thing for millions of us: turkey. Of the 100 million turkeys on farms around the U.S., 46 million of them will be eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Americans will consume another 22 million turkeys over the Christmas holidays, according to the National Turkey Federation. When turkeys arrive at our supermarkets, plucked […]

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12 Oct 2019

How Climate Change is Changing the Menu – And What We Can Do About It

What will we eat in the future? What was once an rhetorical musing has now become the critical question of our time as scientists grapple with tricky questions about life—and larders—in a climate-changing world. Agriculture is both a key contributor to climate change and one of the sectors most vulnerable to those changes. That fact alone […]

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30 Sep 2019

Plant Diversity Leads to More Carbon Stored in The Soil

A new study confirms what most scientists already know, and what proponents of industrial agribusiness either don’t get, or won’t admit: Nature abhors a monoculture. The study suggests that by restoring biodiversity, we can vastly enhance the soil’s potential to store carbon. That’s good news for the climate. And there are co-benefits: healthier, more resilient […]

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26 Jul 2019

USDA Opens the Door to New Untested, Unlabeled GMOs

Our right to know if it’s GMO is officially under attack—again. On June 6, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposed to overhaul longstanding regulations governing genetically modified organisms (GMO). The proposed new rule would revise the agency’s current method for regulating genetically modified plants, and would exclude newer so-called “gene-edited” GMOs. In a statement, […]

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23 Jun 2019

Genetically Engineered Farm Animals: Regulators Rush to Keep Consumers in the Dark

If the biotech industry has its way, the meat, eggs and milk on your plate could soon come from genetically engineered farm animals—and without laws requiring these products to be labeled, you’ll never know. Just a few years ago the idea of genetically engineered farm animals seemed like science fiction to most consumers. But it’s […]

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14 Jun 2019

Life After Glyphosate – Let’s Make it a Reality

Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, was once hailed as a kind of miracle solution to the problem of weeds. Today, glyphosate-based weedkillers like Monsanto’s Roundup are a disgraced product, associated with a shocking and increasing number of health and environmental problems. Glyphosate has long been promoted as a fast-acting weedkiller, as effective in small […]

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