On Monday the world’s first lab-grown, in vitro burger was cooked and eaten in London. Professor Mark Post from Maastricht University, along with his colleagues, took adult stem cells from a cow and then turned them into strips of muscle, which they combined to make a beef patty. Some have dubbed the patty, the ‘Frankenburger’.…
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The current global population stands at over seven billion people. To put this number into perspective, the global population in 1804 was a billion, with predictions of the number of people increasing to nine billion in 2045 (based on current trends). Clearly then, the number of humans on the planet has been rapidly increasing. When…
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The Green Party usually gets accused of being a fringe party, full of eco-warriors, with nothing much to say except how much they want to save the trees. The ethos of the party does lie with its concern for the environment, but this concern seems completely justified and even relates to wider issues in society.…
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E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977) was born in Bonn, Germany and would become one of the most influential economic thinkers of the 20th century. His most well-known book, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973) would give weight to the growing environmental concerns of the 70s. Schumacher was writing at a time when the…
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People choose a vegan diet usually for ethical, health or environmental reasons. These are all valid reasons and I expect that most people justify their plant-based diet on the basis of either animal welfare or animal rights. However, not everyone is receptive to the idea of valuing animals because they are sentient or because they…
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