For over five decades, Herbert has consistently explored one fundamental question: how can a civilization driven by unending growth be reconciled with the limitations of a finite planet? Drawing from disciplines like ecology, systems thinking, urbanism, and political economy, Herbert advocated for cities and economies to function similarly to living organisms.
Their consumption of energy and materials must align with the health of the systems that support them. His primary criticism is that modern economies operate in a predominantly linear fashion, centered around extraction, consumption, and waste, at a magnitude the Earth cannot sustain. He also cautioned that technological efficiency alone is insufficient to avert ecological collapse if societies persist in consuming increasing amounts of resources annually.
Childhood in industrial Essen
Herbert’s awareness of ecological issues was rooted in his personal history and experiences. Born in Essen in 1943, within Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a major industrial hub, Herbert witnessed coal mines, steelworks, and factories shaping both the landscape and post-war reconstruction ideologies.
Herbert later recounted: “I grew up on the outskirts of Essen, a significant industrial area and the main center for weapon production during the Second World War, with companies like Krupp and Thyssen producing various weapons used in the war.”
Some of his earliest memories are inseparable from smoke. From his family home, he observed chimneys emitting thick smoke into the evening sky, while the steel mills glowed red at night. To many, this symbolized prosperity, but even as a child, Herbert was unsettled by the sight.
“The tall chimneys of factories spewed black smoke. Flames shot off steelworks nightly—it was an eerie scene. I remember asking my father where all that smoke ended up and what it would do to the air we breathed. There was no answer to that question,” Herbert recalled.
This concern reemerged when his father bought the family’s first post-war car. “When my father started the engine and smoke came out of the exhaust pipe, I asked again where all that smoke went. Again, there was no answer.” Another pivotal experience occurred when they visited the river Ruhr, which was covered in sticky white foam and filled with dead fish. “I asked why these fish were dying, but again, there was no answer.”
Reflecting back, Herbert often recalled the silence surrounding such questions. Despite technological advancements, modern civilization remained largely unaware of the ecological impact of its actions. However, his childhood wasn’t solely defined by smoke and pollution. Alongside the industrial landscape, there were also gardens, orchards, and forests, where life followed different rhythms. “I was always climbing trees and helping to grow vegetables, fruit, and other crops.” This contrast between industrial extraction and natural regeneration would later shape his understanding of civilization.
Berlin and post-war politics
When Herbert moved to Berlin as a student in the early 1960s, Europe was grappling with the political and moral aftermath of fascism and war. Berlin stood as the symbolic center of Cold War division, split between political systems and separated by walls, fences, and checkpoints.
Across West Germany, the younger generation increasingly rejected the silence surrounding the Nazi past and the moral evasions of post-war society. Universities became hotbeds of political unrest. Anti-authoritarian movements spread across Europe, and material reconstruction no longer sufficed. A generation raised during industrial recovery began seeking alternatives to both Soviet authoritarianism and Western capitalism’s growing consumerism.
Herbert was drawn into these broader debates. Although his father hoped he would pursue art history, Herbert’s interests shifted to politics, sociology, and how societies could recover from war’s devastation. Influential figures like Rudi Dutschke inspired many young Europeans searching for social renewal that resisted both authoritarianism and materialism.
For Herbert, ideology was not an end in itself; he was interested in cultural transformation. Europe had already shown the dangers of industrial power combined with nationalism and technological efficiency devoid of ethical restraint.
London community
Herbert’s quest eventually led him to London in 1965, a period when the city was being reshaped by migration, anti-racist struggles, and cultural experimentation. London was marked by inequality and political volatility, yet it was brimming with potential. Herbert rented a room in Notting Hill Gate, where communities from the former British Empire were transforming the city’s cultural life. He became involved in organizing the early Notting Hill Carnival, long before it became a hallmark cultural event in Britain.
At the time, it was a defiant response to racism and hostility from far-right groups opposed to immigration. “I was one of the organizers of the Notting Hill Carnival in the late 60s,” he later recalled. “We experienced people from diverse backgrounds coming together with steel drums and costumes, parading through Notting Hill Gate and telling the fascists who opposed immigration: bugger off, we will shape the future.”
This experience reinforced a key belief: politics is influenced as much by ordinary communities as by governments and institutions. During this era, environmentalism emerged alongside anti-war activism, feminism, and anti-racist movements, forming a broader critique of industrial society.
“The green movement began to rise in the late 60s,” Herbert said. “The idea of creating a more egalitarian, joyful, and environmentally healthy world was gaining momentum, coming together in the minds of young people like us.”
Herbert spent years as a scriptwriter for the BBC German service, raising a family and staying deeply involved in Notting Hill’s social life. His ecological thinking developed from everyday concerns about community well-being and defining societal health beyond relentless economic growth.
His studies in social anthropology and economics at the London School of Economics enriched this perspective. “I returned to the LSE to study social anthropology, having met extraordinary people from around the world in Notting Hill Gate. That experience inspired me to understand our origins in long-term human history,” he said.
For Herbert, anthropology challenged a core assumption of industrial modernity: that Western economic development was the natural endpoint of human progress. Learning about diverse cultures, he discovered societies where humans saw themselves not as nature’s masters, but as participants within larger ecological systems.
Documentary work
Herbert’s work in filmmaking provided another platform to explore the environmental and social questions shaping his thinking. In the mid-1980s, Herbert and the late John Seymour co-authored Far From Paradise, a groundbreaking seven-hour BBC environmental TV series exploring humanity’s impact on the natural world.
In a 2004 memorial for Seymour, Herbert reflected on their project: “In the mid-1980s, John and I spent three years making the BBC series and co-authoring the book Far From Paradise. We visited many parts of the world, witnessing the impact of industrializing, urbanizing humanity on its host planet—a sobering experience for us both.”
Amazon and Indigenous knowledge
This understanding influenced Herbert’s later work with Indigenous cultures and ecological knowledge systems, particularly during his time in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the late 1980s while filming the documentary Jungle Pharmacy with the Kayapó people. His time in the Amazon deepened ideas he had been developing for years.
Forests were no longer just sources of profit or raw materials but were seen as complex ecological communities shaped by cultural, spiritual, and environmental interaction over generations. In other TV documentaries for Channel 4, Herbert highlighted the rapid destruction of the Amazon due to mining, logging, industrial farming, and road development. As global demand for resources grew, the rainforest was increasingly viewed for its economic potential rather than as a vital ecological system.
Indigenous communities defending their territories faced powerful alliances between governments, corporations, and global finance, treating ecosystems and traditional cultures as barriers to economic expansion. In his writings for Resurgence and The Ecologist, Herbert often returned to the Amazon because it starkly illustrated the ecological consequences of modern economic expansion. He argued that industrial societies must relearn key principles preserved by many Indigenous cultures despite colonial violence: reciprocity, restraint, and understanding that human life relies on ecological balance.
A deeply human perspective
For many years, The Ecologist has been a platform where Herbert shared his ideas about the environment and society’s future. His writing extends beyond conventional environmental commentary, exploring the links between climate change, pollution, and overconsumption, all connected to economic and urban systems.
What sets Herbert’s work apart is its human perspective. He rarely focuses solely on statistics or scientific warnings. Whether writing about cities, forests, oceans, farming, or Indigenous knowledge, he emphasizes the lived consequences of ecological destruction: how to address damaged communities, polluted rivers, disappearing wildlife, exhausted land, and the burdens left for future generations.
In articles like ‘Towards an Indigenous economics’, ‘Biosphere and technosphere’, ‘Reframing economics and Gaia, cyborgs and the memory industry’, Herbert questioned the belief that technology alone could solve environmental problems. He argued that the deeper issue lies in linear economic systems organized around endless consumption and extraction.
His articles ‘Is nature taking revenge?’ and ‘A manifesto for the Coronacene’ further explored the connections between ecological destruction, globalization, and pandemic vulnerability. Herbert argued that COVID-19 was not an isolated crisis but part of broader destabilization caused by humanity’s interference in natural systems. Despite the seriousness of these crises, his writing is rarely fatalistic. He maintained a belief that societies can change course by cooperating with nature rather than dominating it.
Herbert’s ideas also reached a global audience through his books, such as Earthrise, Cities People Planet, The Gaia Atlas of Cities, A Renewable World, and Creating Regenerative Cities. Many of these works have been translated into other languages, including Mandarin. These books explored how societies could establish more balanced relationships with nature. Alongside his books and international policy work, Herbert remains closely connected to the Resurgence Trust’s work. The magazine served as a platform for his ideas to reach beyond governments, urban planners, and environmental institutions.
Cities and ecological metabolism
Herbert’s most influential contribution may be his work on cities and urbanization. Cities fascinated him because they encapsulated many contradictions of industrial civilization. They are hubs of creativity, innovation, and cultural exchange but rely on immense flows of energy, food, water, and raw materials sourced from ecosystems often thousands of miles away.
In his book Cities People Planet, he posed the question: “Can a world of ever-larger cities be environmentally sustainable? Can cities prosper while significantly decreasing resource use? Can they mimic natural ecosystems and transform into circular systems? How can we create cities of beauty, diversity, and sustainability? How can we bring back conviviality to our cities?”
Herbert’s interest in urban ecology began during his Amazon travels in the late 80s, where he saw a large freighter loaded with mahogany planks labeled “London.” At that time, the link between urban centers like London and distant ecosystems was rarely discussed.
This experience led him to study “London’s Metabolism,” examining the hidden flows of food, fossil fuels, timber, water, and industrial materials sustaining modern life. Modern cities appeared self-sustaining only because ecological costs were externalized to farmland, forests, rivers, oceans, and distant supply chains unseen by urban residents.
For Herbert, the modern environmental crisis arose from two worlds falling dangerously out of balance: the biosphere and the technosphere. In Earthrise, Herbert wrote: “Technology gave us the capacity to develop ‘Earth consciousness’ but also caused confusion in our minds, as it separated us from our biological roots.
Having acquired the identity of both man and machine, we suffer a conflict of allegiances. The human part of ourselves still follows the urge to reproduce, love, and care for our offspring as well as the living world from which we were born. But the machine part of us, supposed to serve us, has no such concerns. It is our task to find a mature and frugal use for the technologies we have harnessed. If they seem to have become our masters, then it is time to turn them into servants again. Can technology enhance rather than destroy life on Earth?”
Sustainable Adelaide
For Herbert, cities were not simply economic hubs; they were living systems dependent on healthy relationships between people, resources, and nature. In 2003, Herbert had a unique opportunity to test his ideas in Australia. He was invited to be Adelaide’s inaugural ‘Thinker in Residence’ under South Australian Premier, Mike Rann, helping shape a new environmental vision for the state, with a population of two million, through his report, Creating a Sustainable Adelaide.
In March 2004, Mike Rann announced: “Much of what Herbert proposed makes sense. That’s why we are adopting his ideas. Preserving and improving our environment positions us better for a stronger economy and healthier society. These measures set a new pace for sustainable development and important precedents for future decision-makers.”
Many of his ideas, particularly on renewable energy, water recycling, waste reduction, organic waste composting, urban reforestation, integrated urban planning, and urban agriculture, have since been implemented. Long before “green cities” became a global trend, Adelaide was already moving toward becoming an example of environmentally conscious urban regions, with notable renewable energy supplies.
The limits to growth
Herbert’s long association with the Club of Rome reflects his concern that modern economies continue to treat economic growth as an unquestionable objective, despite mounting ecological evidence against it. The organization’s influential 1972 report, Limits to Growth, warned that endless economic and population growth on a finite planet would eventually collide with ecological boundaries. In this respect, Herbert aligns with ecological thinkers such as Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, and E. F. Schumacher, who understood environmental breakdown as inseparable from deeper crises within modernity itself.
Herbert’s environmental concerns eventually moved beyond books and policy work into direct international action. At the 2002 UN Johannesburg Summit, he helped initiate the ‘Earth Emergency declaration’, a statement signed by hundreds of environmental thinkers, scientists, and campaigners who believed the world was entering a period of profound ecological instability. Rather than treating climate change, inequality, biodiversity loss, and political failure as separate crises, the declaration argued they must be addressed as interconnected symptoms of a civilization that had lost balance with the living Earth.
Regenerative thinking
Over time, Herbert grew increasingly dissatisfied with the language of sustainability itself. By the late twentieth century, sustainability had entered mainstream political discourse but was often reduced to making industrial systems more efficient while leaving their underlying logic unchanged.
Herbert began to focus on ‘regeneration.’ In a 2013 article in The Guardian, he stated: “We need to start thinking of regenerative rather than just sustainable development. We urgently need measures to regenerate soils, forests, and watercourses rather than just sustaining them in a degraded condition. We have the knowledge and technologies to make renewable energy our main source. We urgently need to regenerate local communities and economies that have fallen by the wayside as economic globalization became dominant.”
Future generations
The enduring impact of Herbert’s work lies in the historical period it spans. He has lived through war, reconstruction, decolonization, Cold War division, neoliberal globalization, and accelerating ecological destabilization. His writing carries not just intellectual analysis but historical memory, offering the perspective of someone who witnessed industrial modernity’s phases of expansion and crisis.
A recurring concern in his later work is the theft of ecological stability from future generations. “Today, we are essentially stealing our children’s future through activities like rainforest destruction, climate change, biodiversity loss, and ocean pollution,” he said.
This concern became central to his political engagement, including his role in co-founding the World Future Council (WFC) with Jakob von Uexküll in 2007. Future generations will inherit the consequences of political decisions made long before they can influence them. What can we do to get off their backs? “The idea was to help create a world fit for future generations. We were trying to find the best practices across sustainability and regenerative policies that could be replicated globally,” he explained. “Today, many young people are saying ‘enough is enough, we cannot accept that we don’t have a future!’ To my mind, this is the greatest power we have to generate change in the world,” said Herbert in an interview with Daniel Christian Wahl.
In 2008, Herbert and his WFC colleague, Miguel Mendonca, proposed that the UK government introduce the Feed-in Tariffs (FiT) scheme for accelerating the introduction of renewable energy. Established under the Energy Act 2008 and launched on April 1, 2010, the scheme enabled households, businesses, and communities to receive guaranteed payments for generating their own renewable electricity.
Legacy
Throughout his life, Herbert challenged the notion that endless industrial growth should define human progress. Ideas once dismissed as unrealistic, like regenerative economies, circular systems, and ecological city planning, have now entered mainstream political discussions, partly due to voices like his. However, awareness alone is not enough.
Carbon emissions remain dangerously high, forests continue to vanish, and biodiversity loss accelerates. Despite the crisis’s magnitude, his work never succumbed to fatalism. He believed it was not too late for societies to reconsider their relationships with nature, cities, and each other. His work held a persistent belief that societies could reorganize around ecological restraint, reciprocity, and collective well-being, combining adaptation, mitigation, and regeneration concepts.
Herbert insists on understanding the vast unpaid ecological debts we are imposing on future generations. He suggests creating a new international ‘true cost’ alliance to quantify these amounts sector by sector and confront decision-makers with the realities of their negligence. Herbert Girardet’s legacy is a persistent refusal to accept ecological devastation as inevitable, to separate economics from ethics, and above all, to disbelieve humanity’s capacity for change.
This Author
Monica Piccinini is a Brazilian-British journalist and member of the National Union of Journalists. She regularly contributes to The Ecologist and publishes on Substack, Medium, and her platform, YourVoiz.org. Professor Herbert Girardet, the subject of this essay, was a trustee of the Resurgence Trust from March 2018 to May 2026. Monica had full editorial independence in writing this essay and received no payment from The Ecologist or the Resurgence Trust for her work.
Afterword
Herbie writes: This essay about my work over 50 years came as a complete surprise. I’m not used to so much attention. I’m deeply indebted to Brendan Montague for initiating it, and to Monica Piccinini for putting so much care into writing it. I hope it will add to the extraordinary range of content presented on The Ecologist website since 1970.
