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My students taught me that everything was personal - history, politics, foreign relations - but this approach creates boundaries as well as connections

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Ian Christie

Ian Christie is a writer, researcher and local government policymaker, based in London. He was joint head of environmental and economic policy at Surrey County Council in southeast England. He is an associate of the Green alliance and of the New Economics Foundation. He is a visiting professor of sustainable development at Surrey University and has advised many public agencies and businesses in the UK on environmental policy, sustainability and analysis of political and social change. His publications include From Here to Sustainability: politics in the real world (Earthscan, 2001, with Diane Warburton).

Recent articles


When the levee breaks

The New Orleans disaster should inundate the rich world’s political imagination with awareness of man-made climate change, says Ian Christie.

(This article was first published on 2nd September 2005)

Food: what we eat is who we are

Food, the daily ingredient of human survival, raises deep questions of politics, economics, the environment, and culture. Ian Christie introduces the Ecology & Place theme’s new debate on this most universal yet intimate of themes.

What Europe? Whose century? Which project?

Transatlantic strategic and political divisions lie within the United States and Europe as well as between them. Yet in this contested terrain, Europe’s debility is even more marked in light of the visionary fire of US neo-conservatives. Where is the source of passion and ideas that the European Union needs?

Three visions of politics: Europe in the millennial world


The range of global political possibility has been transformed by post-cold-war turbo-capitalism. A new mapping of the political faultlines defines "high stakes", "shared values", and "natural orders" as competing versions of the European future. But could there yet be a fourth, involving the demise of the European Union itself?

Motorway culture and its discontents

The sheer ugliness and anonymity of motorways seem only to reinforce their destructive environmental impact. Yet even motorways have their poets and celebrants. But what are they doing to our soul?