Edward Goldsmith

Edward René David Goldsmith (8 November 1928 – 21 August 2009), widely known as Teddy Goldsmith, was an Anglo-French environmentalist, writer and philosopher.

He was a member the prominent Goldsmith family.

The eldest son of Major Frank Goldsmith, and elder brother of the financier James Goldsmith.

Edward Goldsmith was the founding editor and publisher of The Ecologist.

Known for his outspoken views opposing industrial society and economic development, he expressed a strong sympathy for the ways and values of traditional peoples.

He co-authored the influential A Blueprint for Survival with Robert Allen, becoming a founding member of the political party "People" (later renamed the Green Party), itself largely inspired by the Blueprint.

Goldsmith's more conservative view of environmentalism put him at odds with socialist currents of thought which came to dominate within the Green Party.

A deep ecologist and systems theorist, Goldsmith was an early proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, having previously developed a similar cybernetic concept of a self-regulating Biosphere.

A talented after-dinner speaker and raconteur, Goldsmith was an articulate spokesman and campaigner, receiving a number of awards for his work protecting the natural world and highlighting the importance and plight of indigenous peoples, including an honorary Right Livelihood Award and the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur.

Goldsmith (widely known as Teddy) was born in Paris in 1928 to a German Jewish father, Frank Goldsmith, and French mother, Marcelle Mouiller.

He entered Millfield School, Somerset, as a grammar student, and he later graduated with honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford (1947–1950).

While studying at Oxford, Goldsmith rejected the reductionist and compartmentalised ideas taught at the time, and he sought a more holistic worldview with which to study societies and the problems facing the world at large.

After fulfilling his National Service as a British Intelligence Officer in Hamburg and Berlin, he involved himself unsuccessfully in a number of business ventures and devoted most of his spare time to the study of the subjects that were to preoccupy him for the rest of his life.

Throughout the 1960s, he spent time travelling the world with his close friend, John Aspinall, witnessing at first hand the destruction of traditional societies.

He concluded that the spread of economic development and its accompanying industrialisation, far from being progressive as claimed, was actually the root cause of social and environmental destruction.

In London, at meetings of the Primitive People's Fund (the committee that founded Survival International), Goldsmith teamed up with the fund's treasurer Robert Prescott-Allen, the explorer Jean Liedloff, and a writer from World Medicine, Peter Bunyard, to found The Ecologist in 1969.

After rejecting what he saw as the excessively reductionist and compartmentalised approach of mainstream academia, he spent much of his time researching and developing his own theories for the unification of the sciences.

The Theory of a Unified Science was heavily influenced by cybernetics, as well as the General Systems Theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the holism of the early academic ecologists, and the functionalism employed by many anthropologists.

His theory would later be published, in its final form, as The Way: An Ecological World View. (see below)

Early on, Goldsmith had formulated a concept of the Biosphere as an integrated cybernetic entity, the self-regulating parts (in which he included tribal societies) co-operating, largely unconsciously, for the mutual benefit of the whole, a view that anticipated aspects of the Gaia thesis, of which he was to become a leading proponent.

Goldsmith was also a critic of neo-Darwinism.

He claimed that it is a reductionist theory and that if you understand evolution, it is necessary to "abandon the reductionistic and mechanistic paradigm of science".

Having established The Ecologist in 1969 with founding editors Robert Allen, Jean Liedloff, and Peter Bunyard, Goldsmith was to use the journal as a platform for his theoretical concerns with regular articles appearing under the heading "Towards a Unified Science".

The journal also became an important forum for the early green movement, with articles focusing on the relevance and survival of hunter-gatherer societies, alternative technology and organic farming, together with prescient articles about climate change, resource depletion, and nuclear accidents.

They were accompanied by the usual gamut of articles examining pollution, overpopulation, deforestation, soil erosion, corporate power, large dams, and, not least, the World Bank's alleged role in "financing the destruction of our planet".

Signed by over thirty of the leading scientists of the day, including Sir Julian Huxley, Sir Frank Fraser Darling, Sir Peter Medawar, Sir Peter Scott, and C. H. Waddington, Goldsmith and his fellow editor Robert Allen made headlines in January 1972 with A Blueprint for Survival.

The Blueprint was a far reaching proposal for a radical transition to a largely decentralised and deindustrialised society, an attempt to prevent what the authors referred to as " the breakdown of society and the irreversible disruption of the life-support systems on this planet".

It became a key text for the early Green movement, selling over half a million copies, and it was translated into 16 languages.

In many ways, it anticipated the concerns taken up by today's Transition Movement.

Goldsmith and Allen argued that rather than devise imaginary utopias, as did Marxist and liberal political theorists of the time, they should instead look to the example of existing tribal peoples, who, the authors claimed, were real-life working models of societies perfectly adapted to both their long-term survival needs and the needs of the living world on which they depended.

The tribal peoples alone, the authors argued, had demonstrated a viable means by which the most pressing problems facing humanity could be answered successfully.

Such societies were characterised by their small, human-scale communities, low-impact technologies, successful population controls, sustainable resource management, holistic and ecologically integrated worldviews and a high degree of social cohesion, physical health, psychological well-being and spiritual fulfilment of their members.

In 1973, buoyed by the success of the Blueprint and a sudden rise in public awareness of ecological issues, partly brought about by the Stockholm Conference and the publication of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth in the same year.

Goldsmith and his editorial team moved from their offices in London to relocate to rural Cornwall, in the far west of England.

Goldsmith and his colleagues bought themselves farms, and for the following 17 years, they attempted to form a small-scale, relatively self-sufficient community of their own, and The Ecologist continued to be produced on-site, in between their other chores.

The Blueprint was a major inspiration for the embryonic political party called "People" (later to become the Green Party, ) which invited Goldsmith to stand for the Eye constituency in Suffolk as their candidate in the February 1974 general election.

The campaign focused on the threat of desertification from the intensive farming practised in the area, which Goldsmith emphasised with the help of a Bactrian camel supplied by Aspinall.

Goldsmith was in turn accompanied by bearded supporters dressed in the garb of Arab sheiks, the implication being that if modern oil-intensive farming practises were allowed to continue, the camel would be the only viable means of transport left in Suffolk.

Goldsmith lost his deposit, but his unorthodox campaign succeeded in attracting the media's attention and highlighted the issues.

He again stood for the now-renamed Ecology Party at the European elections in 1979, now winning a more respectable portion of the vote.