New Website!

This website is undergoing a long-overdue make-over which includes adding much more content – past and present – and an easier way of navigating through what’s here.

There are already hundreds of articles on the site – with more to come – covering a broad spectrum of environmental, sustainability and health topics and an enhanced search function should make it easier to find everything. I hope you like it!

Thanks to Nigel Hayler at nPress Media for his continued patience, creativity and support.

Please bear with me while I continue to populate the site and check through all the links!

The Poison Papers

Yesterday a blow was struck for both press freedom and health freedom too. A project called the Poison Papers makes available to the public decades of newly digitised data on the dangers of industrial chemicals – and the practices of the companies that make them. Most of the documents – which include scientific studies and […]

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About That House Dust Link to Weight Gain…

It’s been fun to watch the media scramble to catch-up with the facts, as highlighted in a recent laboratory study linking house dust with weight gain.

What the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology said was that a) house dust isn’t just ‘dirt’ – it is full of all the toxins that slough off into our environment from the products we use, including phthalates, pesticides and flame retardants; and b) because these are endocrine-disrupting chemicals very small amounts can cause biological havoc in this case causing immature fat cells to mature and begin accumulating triglycerides.

In some instances the toxins in the dust samples caused the fat cells to divide creating a larger pool of hungry fat cells. For children whose are exposed to proportionately more toxins per kilo of bodyweight  – and who are much more sensitive to the effects of toxic substances –  this could trigger a lifelong tendency to overweight. You can read the news story here.

Its important to recognise that this is not new information. Rather it is information that conventional science – which created these very profitable chemicals – likes to ignore.

For those who are interested I wrote about this problem years ago in two of my books:

The 21st Century is Making You Fat (2008) and Living Dangerously (2003).

Dead Zone – Where the Wild Things Were

Philip Lymbery’s  new book Dead Zone – Where the Wild Things Were, follows on from his international best-seller Farmageddon.

It looks at the links between industrial farming and the destruction of iconic wildlife like the Sumatran elephant, the North American bison and the Brazilian jaguar. It can be hard for anyone to get their head around just how far reaching the consequences of our current approach to food production is and the effect on wildlife is largely hidden behind many more obvious harms such as to farm animals, soil and farmland biodiversity. Well done to Philip (Compassion in World Farming’s CEO) for exposing it.

I’ve worked with Philp before on the Nocton Dairy campaign. This time I’ve been lucky enough to work as a producer on the video trailers for the book, via Ecostorm, the investigative agency with which I founded the Ecologist Film Unit.

The trailer for the Dead Zone is below. Other films are on a special playlist on my YouTube channel.