A British environmental magazine, The Ecologist’s aim was to raise public awareness of societies’ impact on the natural world, very much in line with what we might expect to be synonymous with the ground-swell of activity in that decade. Something that really comes across is that it wasn’t until much more recently, the mid-90’s, that dominant areas of environmental concern - pollution, population, energy - came to be seen as part of an interlaced context and a wider, global climate trajectory. Leafing through these beautifully designed magazines, it’s genuinely striking how Britain, politically, to me seems to be stuck in just about the exact same place we might have been in 1970, in terms of damaging stalemates around economic and environmental values.

Passages and digital cuttings from The Ecologist were present in the core exhibition at Hull Central Library, but we felt it was important to present a selection of copies from the stacks within the project. Here some of those can be seen, together with a series of bleached cyanotypes, made in response to the design components of the magazine, and a presentation of the INDEX label work formed from multiple indexes of all books pulled from the reference collections.

“We have all been taught since our most tender childhood that science, technology and industry are enabling us to create a materialist paradise from which the basic human problems of poverty, unemployment, disease, ignorance, war and famine will have been eliminated once and for all. It is increasingly evident, however, that this is not happening.

The truth is that we have totally misinterpreted the real nature of the problems for which economic growth is supposed to provide a remedy.” (The Ecologist, Comment, Vol. 3 No. 11 November 1973)