Leigh Phillips can do a pretty decent job of writing science-y stuff.
Hello! Welcome to my website promoting all things Leigh Phillips!
I am a science writer and a political journalist. My work has appeared in Nature, the New Scientist, Science, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the New Republic, and Jacobin, amongst other outlets.
There are two other people named Leigh Phillips out there on the internet of equally modest notoriety. One is a Welsh film composer and the other is the author of The Stripper’s Guide to Looking Great Naked. Please note that I am neither of these Leigh Phillipses.
My areas of specialization include climate change, energy systems, the earth system, and microbiology (including infectious disease), but have covered a much wider range of fields, from computational materials discovery, complex systems and operations research to agronomy, primatology and astronomy.
I am based in Victoria, British Columbia, but on assignment, I have visited tuberculosis clinics in Siberia, mathematics academies in South Africa, and political-prisoner solidarity fundraisers in Mexico City. I have filed reports from the high Arctic, North Sea oil rigs, and Roma villages in rural Hungary.
I spent almost a decade in Brussels and Amsterdam as a reporter and editor, primarily for the EUobserver, a daily online newspaper covering the European Union, but also for a trio of European Commission magazines about the environment, agriculture and information technology. I have also worked as the science writer for the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions at the University of Victoria and for the Paris-based International Council for Science.
Parallel to my science writing, I have been a Brussels-based beat reporter covering European affairs, climate diplomacy, and economics and finance, and have written commentary in defence of civil liberties, reason, economic equality and democratic principle—in essence what historian Jonathan Israel describes as the ‘Radical Enlightenment’.
In particular, I am very much focused on the interface between science and society, especially philosophy of science, economics and politics. If there is a theme that unites most of my work, it is exploring the emergence in the 21st Century of a framework of geo-anthropic systems governance—or the struggle over how we as the globally dominant species are beginning to steward human and earth systems in a more rational, democratic, and egalitarian fashion.
I am the author of two books: Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts (Zero Books, 2015), which was a progressive and ecomodernist discussion of environmental challenges, and The People’s Republic of Walmart (Verso, 2019), co-authored with economist Michal Rozworski, on logistics, complexity and the history of the economic calculation debate.
When not writing, I am out cycling, drinking a fine Pacific Northwest craft beer or three, or spending too much money in independent bookshops and record stores.
leigh.phillips@gmail.com
@Leigh_Phillips
“This says all that needs to be said.”
“Everyone around here that I know loves your writing.”
“One of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you’re likely to read. ”
science writing
Featured
Please find some of my biggest hits to the right, or click on the green button below to take you through to a complete list of my science writing clippings.
Specializations:
My science journalism has covered subjects ranging from computational materials discovery to anti-nanotechnology terrorism, but the fields I write most often about include energy systems, climate impacts, evolution & ecology, and infectious disease.
What’s my ‘USP’?
I studied both the natural sciences and the humanities. As a result, I sometimes find myself wishing that more scientists were familiar with philosophy and that more philosophers were familiar with science. As I mention in the About section, I am especially interested in the interface between science and society, especially philosophy of science, economics and politics.
If there is a theme that unites most of my work, it is exploring the emergence in the 21st Century of a framework of geo-anthropic systems governance—or the struggle over how we as the globally dominant species are beginning to steward human and earth systems in a more rational, democratic, and egalitarian fashion.
DATA VISUALIZATION & design
Featured
In recent years, I’ve expanded the type of projects I work on to design work including data visualization and scientific illustration.
To see more examples of my work, smash the green button below, and it will take you through to my portfolio of infographics, data visualization, schematics, and graphic design at Behance, the design marketplace.
POLITICAL JOURNALISM
Featured
Please find some of my biggest hits to the right, or click on the green button below to take you through to a complete list of my political journalism clippings.
Specializations:
European affairs, climate & energy, governance and democracy, research and innovation policy.
What’s my ‘USP’?
I spent almost a decade based out of Brussels, the capital of the European Union, covering EU and member-state policy governing climate, biodiversity, agriculture, ICT, research and medicine. For a two-year period following the 2008 economic crisis, I followed European economic and financial affairs. I also maintained a reporting side=interest in the rise of the new far right on the continent.
Reportage
I engage in straight-forward news reporting and am strongly committed to US-style principles of journalistic integrity and objectivity.
Essays
But I do also have opinions that inform my analysis pieces and essays. I am a progressive but (or rather therefore) with an over-riding emphasis on defence of civil liberties, democracy, universalism and progress. I believe that the steady expansion of human freedom and solving our myriad ecological difficulties will come from a combination of scientific ingenuity and egalitarian transformation of our social systems: an extension of the Radical Enlightenment project, not from a retreat from it.
books
austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff
(Zero Books, 2015)
Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years.
Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance.
In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.
The people’s republic of walmart
(Verso, 2019. Co-authored with economist Michal Rozworski)
The largest planned economy in history is not the USSR, but Walmart
For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us?
An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.
fiction
In my spare time, I am working on an apocalyptic (yet, in its way, optimistic and Promethean) microbiological, ecological and archaeological science-fiction thriller with lashings of British ‘Folk Horror’ mood in the style of The Wicker Man, Children of the Stones, Quatermass, and 1970s Doctor Who.
Watch this space.