Teddy Goldsmith was a highly influential figure in the world environmental movement whose greatest achievement perhaps lay in converting his powerful younger brother, the financier Sir James Goldsmith, to his cause. In 1969 Teddy Goldsmith founded The Ecologist magazine, the editorship of which subsequently passed to his nephew, Zac Goldsmith.

Teddy Goldsmith’s credo, a utopian yearning for a simpler world of smaller, self-sufficient communities, and the dismantling of much of the international trading system, was first set out in his book, Can Britain Survive? (1971). Blueprint for Survival came a year later, which among other things accurately predicted the coming Middle East oil embargo. In it Goldsmith warned that the oil industry was “the soft underbelly of capitalism”.

Though colourfully outspoken, purposefully antagonistic and with political and social views that would make many of today’s environmentalists blanch, Goldsmith was one of the founders of the modern green movement. Before he appeared on the scene, as one early follower said, “much of ecology had been about the complex life in duck ponds”.

Goldsmith’s ambition, undoubtedly achieved over the last quarter of the 20th century, was to see a reinvention of ecological thinking to make it the study of the entire organic world, with mankind included but not necessarily at its centre. In Blueprint for Survival, characterised at publication in some quarters as a “doomwatch” thesis, he said that if humanity pushed things too far, “if for instance the insecticides we use to replace the self-regulating controls that normally ensure the stability of insect populations were to destroy nitrogen-fixing bacteria or pollinating insects, all the money and all the technology in the world would not suffice to replace them and thereby to prevent life processes from grinding to a halt”.

Goldsmith was aided in the writing of the Blueprint by Robert Allen, his deputy at The Ecologist. It was also supported by 33 signatories described at the time as distinguished scientists. The work overcame doubts expressed about the nature of the authors’ expertise — one observed said that Goldsmith and Allen were “19th-century amateurs” when it came to their academic credentials. An editorial in Nature magazine, meanwhile, said the manifesto was an attempt “to fan public anxiety about problems which have either been exaggerated or are non-existent”.

A 1971 reviewer of Can Britain Survive, in The Times Literary Supplement, said that Goldsmith argued his case very persuasively in one essay, but attempted to bludgeon readers with undigested and unqualified statistics in another, and sank “unworthily” to blank assertion in a third. Goldsmith’s catastrophe theories were further expanded upon in such books as Stable Society (1977), Great Britain or Wasteland? (1986) and The Great U-turn (1988).

Ironically, in view of his brother’s ascent to great wealth, which was in large part garnered by working in international commerce, Teddy Goldsmith roundly condemned big business as the enemy of the natural world and of the poor, and expressed an unremitting hostility to the market economy. In a further irony, it was widely believed among his friends that Teddy had set James on the path to riches with a well-timed loan at the outset of the latter’s business career.

James, who died in 1997, in turn reciprocated by financially supporting Teddy’s magazine, The Ecologist, and was eventually to throw his considerable weight behind many of his brother’s campaigns against free trade and other of his bêtes noires, including the European Union, the World Bank (in particular its propensity to fund hydroelectric dams in Third World countries) and the International Monetary Fund.

Teddy Goldsmith was an advocate of a return to local currencies and barter systems, and an enemy of what he described as the computer-based productivity revolution with its worldwide toll in jobs. He also opposed international trade, which he believed, by obliging them to satisfy the needs of others, robbed poorer countries of their ability to become self-sufficient.

He also attacked what he called the “medical-industrial complex”, which encouraged health services not so much to cure the sick as to sell the drugs and equipment they produce.

Nor did scientists escape his ire. They, he said in 1972, “are constantly barking up a gum tree because they cannot understand each other. They are looking a little bits of reality, that is why they cannot perceive the whole. They are victims of their own specialised disciplines.”

So far as it was possible for so good-natured a man, he could be venomous towards the international companies that control much of world trade. In 1977 he objected to Britain’s willingness to reprocess nuclear waste from Japan. If the UK accepted such work, he said, it would joined the ranks of “banana republics whose political leaders are prepared to do dangerous, biologically destructive and socially destructive things for other richer countries in order to earn quick money”.