Age of rage

Arrogant, sometimes outrageously authoritarian, but always fizzing with ideas, The Ecologist magazine has always been the wild child of the environment movement. Like The Who song, it seemed destined to die before it got old. But here it is, 30 years on, with founder Teddy Goldsmith in the process of handing over to his brother's son, Zac. And it's still in a rage - over Monsanto, globalisation, toxic chemicals, nuclear power and much more.

The Ecologist began life in the glory days of the environment movement. It first hit the news stands in 1970, after Silent Spring, Rachel Carson's seminal book on pesticide poisoning, and Paul Ehrlich's doom-laden demographic vision, The Population Bomb, but before the first Earth Summit, at Stockholm in 1972. Its birth coincided with the emergence of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and helped forge a global environmental movement.

Goldsmith was the son of a Tory MP, elder brother of Jimmy, future financier and bosom pal of the gambling club owner and maverick zoo-keeper John Aspinall, who died recently. Teddy was a dropout anthropologist who devoted his twenties to travelling the world and campaigning to save endangered tribes. "I began to realise that the survival of primitive peoples and of the environment were inseparable," he says. "The root problem was economic development. So I decided to start a paper to explore these issues."

Teddy has never believed in half measures. The first issue, published in July 1970, declared overpopulation to be the world's number one problem and proposed enforced sterilisation to halve the world's population. But his creation has enjoyed considerable skills in prophesy. That same first issue predicted an Alaskan oil spill two decades ahead of the Exxon Valdez and warned of a Chernobyl-like nuclear disaster. Meanwhile, in an early excursion on his lifelong search for a "bio-ethic", Teddy wrote on "cybernetics, society and the ecosystem" - creating an image of the planet as a single self-sustaining organism that pre-dated James Lovelock's first book on Gaia by nine years.

Perhaps it was Teddy's French upbringing, but his magazine has always had more affinity with pyrotechnic intellectuals of the Parisian Left Bank than with the more sedate rubbish recyclers of Richmond in south-west London, where it was for many years produced.

In its first months, The Ecologist compiled a Blueprint for Survival, a radical green manifesto that went on to sell 750,000 copies in paperback and kept the magazine financially afloat for years. The blueprint proposed the formation of a movement for political survival, which led directly to the creation of the People Party, later renamed the Ecology Party and finally the Green Party.

The Ecologist has been first with many of the big environmental stories - often by many years. It was discussing global climate change during the African droughts of the mid-1970s. It revealed the torching of the Amazon rainforest in the early 1980s. It was the first to expose the worldwide social and environmental destruction from large dams - at a time when most greens still saw hydroelectricity as the key to a cleaner, greener future.

It exposed the fallacy of cheap nuclear energy long before conventional economists tumbled to the truth. And it railed against the World Bank and the globalisation of world trade 15 years before Seattle. It poured scorn on the briefly fashionable 'green consumerism'. And it was producing cover features on the politics of seeds and the patenting of life back in the mid-1980s. In short, the modern green agenda has a striking resemblance to The Ecologist's back catalogue.

Because it takes itself immensely seriously, the magazine has often been a hotbed of internal disputes. Teddy's flirtations with the far right have caused several colleagues to leave in disgust. An early article by Robert Allen, apparently backing Pol Pot's murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, didn't go down too well. Nor has what stalwart Peter Bunyard calls "Teddy's adherence to the notion that traditional societies alone have the key to sustainable living".

Such dogmatism attracted and later repelled Nick Hildyard, a student volunteer who came to be probably the second most influential person in the magazine's history. The eventual split between the two men in 1996 lit up a major schism within the environment movement itself.

Goldsmith's approach, best exemplified by his belief in population control, is essentially authoritarian. But Hildyard turned the magazine for long periods into an anti-authoritarian mouthpiece for progressive community groups from around the world opposing the forces of globalisation - whether dam builders or seed companies or military juntas or timber companies. And he embraced concepts largely alien to Goldsmith, such as feminism and anti-racism.

One of Hildyard's final issues, a 1996 special on the green revolution, launched a full-frontal assault on Goldsmith's views on population. It declared:

"No matter how much food is produced, how few babies are born or how dramatically human numbers fall, it is the nature of the modern market economy remorselessly to generate scarcity ... Blaming [this] on 'over-population' has long provided the most powerful with an explanation for human misery that does not indict themselves."

Few were surprised when the two parted shortly afterwards. Hildyard says now he regrets staying so long. But the truth is that the tension between the two approaches could be immensely creative.

The magazine is now being reborn, edited by Jimmy Goldsmith's son Zac. It looks more like a conventional magazine these days, with colour pictures and celebrity columnists. Its cover says it is "rethinking basic assumptions". But it still packs a punch. Its Monsanto files special issue was so hot that The Ecologist was forced to change its printers. Its uncompromising opening lines could have come out of any era of the magazine's past: "Genetic engineering threatens to upset the Earth's ecological balance, and to undermine the livelihoods of millions of people round the world. It is a technology that is almost entirely controlled by a handful of giant transnational corporations, and its effects are often irreversible."

In a world of global media groups, you cannot imagine any conglomerate opening a bidding war for The Ecologist. And that is the measure of its success.