Can healthcare ever be sustainable?

May 2011 Monthly Subscribers Newsletter

Ecologist

May 11th, 2011

Welcome to your May subscribers newsletter. This month is a full and varied read taking in carbon trading, beef production, rare earths and shale gas as well as a special on health. To access this exclusive content plus other articles, log in and scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you can download your newsletter

EDITORIAL

You may have missed it, but a few weeks ago the Ecologist published a major special report - one of our biggest such projects for several years - examining one of Britain’s great institutions, the cuppa. The issues that lie behind production and supply of most everyday food staples – from cocoa to coffee, beef to bacon, soya to salad, prawns to pineapples – have been investigated and documented (many of them here in the Ecologist) but it seemed that no-one had taken the classic British cuppa and subjected it to such close scrutiny.

This is despite the fact that each day, millions of us take a small bag, drop it into a cup, pour in boiling water, and add a dash of milk plus a spoonful of sugar. We basically start the day with it, we end the day with it, we serve it socially or in times of distress. It’s our favourite drink, after water.

For our investigation we sent Verity Largo to Kenya to report on life for some of the thousands of estate workers who live on plantations supplying two of our favourite teas – PG Tips and Lipton. Owners of the Kericho plantation, Unilever, and the Dutch research outfit SOMO, paint two very different pictures of conditions at the...

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