The Ecologist: Five Decades of Environmental Journalism Online
The Ecologist is one of the world's longest-running environmental publications, founded in 1970 and now published online at theecologist.org by the Resurgence Trust, an educational charity registered in England and Wales. Described by its publisher as an environmental news and analysis website covering climate, nature and ecological justice, it carries daily news, investigations and opinion aimed at readers who want the root causes of environmental stories examined, not only their after-effects. Its print magazine ended in 2009, and since 2012 its print presence has continued inside the bi-monthly Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, while the website continues under its own editorial direction. Few titles can trace a direct line from the first wave of modern environmentalism to today's climate politics; The Ecologist can.
Founded by Edward Goldsmith in 1970
The Ecologist was created in 1970 by Edward Goldsmith, known to colleagues as Teddy, as a forum for academics and writers to publish papers considered too radical for other magazines and the mainstream press. It emerged from the first wave of environmental awareness that followed Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which had exposed the dangers of bioaccumulative pesticides in food chains, and from direct encounters with the destruction of indigenous communities in the Amazon. Goldsmith had been present at the founding of Survival International, and collaborators from that circle, including Robert Allen, helped launch the magazine in July 1970. It began as a small academic journal with an initial circulation of only about 400 copies. Its approach, ecological systems thinking applied to food, chemicals, corporations and development, set it apart from nature writing of the time.
A Blueprint for Survival
The young magazine made its name internationally with A Blueprint for Survival, its groundbreaking environmental manifesto published in 1972, the year of the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which Goldsmith attended alongside Satish Kumar, the editor of Resurgence. The Blueprint argued that industrial society's pursuit of endless growth was unsustainable and set out the case for a decentralised, stable society. It became one of the founding documents of the modern green movement, helped prompt the formation of political ecology parties in Britain, and established The Ecologist's habit of using special issues to intervene in public debate. The same period saw the founding of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; The Ecologist was the movement's journal of ideas, publishing the arguments its campaigners would later carry into the streets.
Growth into a leading environmental magazine
Through the following decades the magazine grew from its academic origins into one of the world's leading environmental affairs magazines, with monthly sales, including subscriptions and newsstand copies, reaching around 20,000. Its coverage broadened and its style became more journalistic. Recurring subjects included food and farming, climate change, corporate power, chain stores, chemicals and pesticides, and the corporatisation of the mass media. The Ecologist did not follow the doctrine of any single political movement and was accused at different times of being both left-wing and right-wing; its stated ambition was to help readers rethink basic assumptions about the world. Many of the writers and campaigners who passed through its pages went on to become leading figures in the wider environmental movement, giving the magazine an alumni network out of proportion to its circulation.
The Monsanto issue and the Zac Goldsmith years
In 1998 Zac Goldsmith took over as editor and broadened the magazine's appeal, moving it further from an academic journal towards a newsstand magazine. That same year The Ecologist devoted an entire edition to examining the environmental record of the biotechnology giant Monsanto, responding to the company's European advertising claim that biotechnology was a matter of opinion and readers should hear all of them. When the magazine's contracted printer refused to print the edition for fear of legal reprisals, Goldsmith found another printer. The Monsanto issue became the biggest seller in the magazine's history and was translated into six languages. The episode captured the title's character: an willingness to take on a litigious corporation, and a belief that a small magazine could set an agenda that larger outlets would then follow.
Digital first: website, digital editions and the end of print
The Ecologist moved early and decisively online. Its website, theecologist.org, launched in 2005, and the first digital edition of the magazine was produced in 2006. On 8 April 2009 the title announced that it was relaunching solely online, and the July 2009 issue, which reached shelves on 19 June 2009, was its last print edition. The reasoning was reach as much as cost: online, the magazine could address a global audience rather than the limits of UK print distribution. It continued as an online magazine for the next three years, publishing monthly newsletters until May 2012. That digital decade means the title listed in today's online news directories is not a print brand with a website attached, but a publication that chose the internet as its primary home earlier than most of its contemporaries.
Merger with Resurgence in 2012
On 1 June 2012 The Ecologist merged with Resurgence magazine, and the first issue of the combined Resurgence & Ecologist appeared in September 2012. The two titles had been closely associated for forty years: their editors had attended the Stockholm conference together in 1972 and the magazines had produced a one-off joint issue in 1974. Resurgence, founded in 1966 by John Papworth and edited for 43 years by Satish Kumar, brought a complementary emphasis on philosophy, arts, ethical living and engaged activism. Under the merger, the bi-monthly print magazine carries a dedicated Ecologist section, preserving its harder-edged news analysis in print, while the Ecologist website continues to publish independently under separate editorial direction. Both the magazine and the websites are published by the Resurgence Trust.
The Resurgence Trust and charitable publishing
The Resurgence Trust is an educational charity, established in 2006 and registered in England and Wales, which owns and publishes The Ecologist website and the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. The trust is based at the Resurgence Centre in Hartland, Devon. Charitable ownership distinguishes The Ecologist from commercially owned environment desks: its stated aim is to educate and inform as many people as possible about the wonders of nature, the crisis facing the natural world, and the best solutions and methods for managing that crisis. The trust is a company limited by guarantee as well as a registered charity, and it notes that views expressed in articles on the site may not necessarily reflect those of the trust, its trustees or its staff, a formulation that protects space for the provocative opinion writing the brand was founded on.
What The Ecologist publishes today
The modern website publishes new articles daily across news, investigations and comment. Climate change remains a central beat, alongside biodiversity loss, pollution, food systems, energy, corporate accountability and ecological justice, the framing in its current description by the Resurgence Trust. The through-line from 1970 is the insistence on root causes: an Ecologist story about a flood, a pesticide or a new oil licence is expected to ask which economic structures and corporate interests produced it. That approach, systems thinking applied journalistically, was unusual when Goldsmith founded the magazine and has since become the standard grammar of serious environmental reporting, one reason the title's archive, which includes the famous 1998 Monsanto edition, remains a reference point for researchers.
Influence and legacy
The Ecologist has been described as the world's most respected environmental affairs magazine, and its influence is documented in the movement it helped create. It published early warnings on pesticides, nuclear power, consumerism and industrial agriculture; platformed thinkers who shaped green politics; and demonstrated, with the Monsanto issue, that independent magazines could challenge corporations protected by legal threats and reluctant printers. As part of the combined Resurgence & Ecologist, its name also sits on one of Britain's longest-running green print magazines, whose contributors over the years have ranged from economist E. F. Schumacher to James Lovelock and Vandana Shiva on the Resurgence side. Longevity itself is part of the record: a title founded before the first Earth Day era had fully formed is still publishing daily more than five decades later.
The Ecologist now
Today The Ecologist operates as the online arm of the Resurgence Trust's publishing, based in London in its earlier directory listings and produced alongside the Hartland-based trust. Readers can follow daily environmental news and analysis on the website, read the Ecologist section in each bi-monthly issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, and support the work through membership of the trust. In a crowded field of climate newsletters and campaign sites, it remains distinctive for the depth of its archive and the directness of its lineage: the same publication that issued A Blueprint for Survival in 1972 now applies the same question to the net-zero transition, industrial food and biodiversity collapse, namely whether the underlying system, not merely its symptoms, needs to change.
