About The Site

For over a decade, I worked in various research and campaigning roles exposing global corruption and corporate abuses, destruction of forests and forest peoples’ rights. I loved working with some brilliant people – including many dedicated activists in the Global South – and going toe-to-toe with multinationals and their teams of expensive lawyers. But despite the thrill and occasional victories, I always sensed that real change required a deeper, systemic shift.

Since 2017, I’ve been trying to trace back to the roots some of the ecological and social problems – so obvious to us now – that I’d been working on as an investigative campaigner.

I’ve written about rebellious voices, now and in the past, who have pointed out the flaws and unquestioned assumptions of our dominant stories and illuminated new visions. This includes Susan Strange’s path-breaking work on financial globalisation that reimagines politics and economics. It includes the ‘philosophical plumbing’ of Mary Midgely scrutinising the ‘imaginative world visions’ of various disciplines, especially the ones that think they are totally objective. It also includes Lynn Margulis’ new insight into life on Earth, through symbiosis and Gaia theory. These thinkers and others could be called an ‘organic school’ which exposes the flaws and consequences of a mechanistic vision of humans, society, and the world.

My current project is a book tracing the history and influence of the mechanistic approach in economics: the idea that there are abstract, natural “laws”. It is my belief that if we are to preserve democracy and avoid ecological collapse, we need to see that economics is less ‘social physics’ and more ‘living history’. We need a new holistic vision.

The name Earthrise comes from the first photograph taken of the Earth rising up from the dark side of the moon, which showed it as a beautiful, luminous beacon in the bleakness of space. Captured by the crew of NASA’s Apollo 8 over fifty years ago, the image helped spark the global environmental movement and offers us a snapshot of 3.8 billion years of riotously interconnected life on planet Earth.

Click here to read my writing and here for more about me.