The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Glenn is a multidisciplinarian with a background in geography. Besides being a published author, he also edited "A Patented World? The Privatisation of Life and Knowledge," published by Jacana in South Africa. He currently is on the editorial board of the SA Journal of Natural Medicine.
Additionally, Glenn has written many commentaries and analyses of wide ranging issues including waste management, water use, food security, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, health, agricultural fuels, marine resources, climate and many other environmental and socially relevant issues.
He has also presented many papers and talks to a wide range of audiences. He specialises in communicating complex scientific issues in an accessible manner. He is a freelance writer and researcher.
Glenn Ashton -
Book: The Spirit Level
By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published by Allen Lane/Penguin
ISBN: 978-1-846-14039-6
You know how you feel when you see a new product that seems so intuitive, so obvious, you wished you had invented it?
Some time ago I found myself wondering why nobody has yet managed to put together, in a convincing way, the thesis that unequal societies are far more prone to social ills than those with greater financial equality.
Even before I...
Glenn Ashton -
Apartheid South Africa was an arcanely bureaucratic, over regulated society. Through laws both petty and detailed, it regulated the lives of its citizens in ways that continue to affect us today. While we have cast off the chains of legalised racism we have not sworn off our national propensity to rely on centralised regulation through arcane legal structures to arrive at the collective goals we visualised when queueing to vote in 1994.
This reliance on the law, while perhaps necessary to...
Glenn Ashton -
One of the crude features of the inequity in our global economic order is that just eight countries, the G8, make the rules by which an entire planet comprising 192 countries have to live by. The G8 have appropriated this privilege because they are the richest countries in the world.
There's something terribly antiquated about the system. If one were to make an objective call on the global economic order, one would have to acknowledge that archaic remnants of 'empire' still permeate...
Glenn Ashton -
Is President Jacob Zumas proposal to create the 'opportunity' for half a million jobs in South Africa over the next six months a goal that we all must embrace?
Perhaps the greatest risk South Africa faces is of the chasm between rich and poor widening to ever more extreme proportions, threatening to rend the fragile social fabric of our young nation. So how can we, as a nation, reduce the economic disparity in the most efficient manner?
Social polarisation through increased disparity...
Glenn Ashton -
Inflation is generally described as too much money chasing too few goods. This is based upon a central tenet of economics, which states that as goods become scarce they become more valuable, and vice versa. Humbug, I say.
We have recently seen a steady rise in levels of consumer inflation in South Africa. A major driver of inflation has not been properly identified in the media, by economists or even amongst those whose aim is to regulate national economic policy, is the influence of the...
Glenn Ashton -
We are more than a decade into the global experiment to utilise biotechnology to genetically engineer some of our major food crops, yet the facts around this supposed agricultural revolution remain as disputed as ever.
We were told there were two primary motivations to promote genetically modified (GM) crops. The first was that they would be able to increase agricultural productivity in order to feed a burgeoning global population on less land. The second was that we would be able to...
