About Catharine Stott

This is me clutching a duckling who busy tickling me with her beak.

I live in Bristol, UK, in a lovely inner city terrace with my trusty sidekick Olly Bolly, a 20-year-old brown cat inherited from my mum.

Having grown up in the 70s in an organic household, I’ve always been a greenie and am health and well-being writer for The Source, the green magazine for the UK’s South West.

I also do copy-writing and editing for various organisations including The National Tree Safety Group, a fantastic initiative to stop people chopping down trees for fear of being sued if they fall and kill or injure someone.

I do my best everyday to live my values, which, bearing in mind that until I was 30 were pretty sketchy,  are still evolving.

These are some of them:

• life’s too short not to be an adventure
• work should be fun and not more than three days a week
• earn my money doing work that contributes to the well-being of the planet
• there are already far too many people on Earth, so don’t have kids; borrow someone else’s
• eat organic, buy green, grow your own, love everyone
• I’m a lifelong experiment in self-development
• make gloves not war
• never, ever, ever vote Tory.

Mini work CV

Trained with Thompson Regional Newspapers in 1991 and worked for the London News Service, then The Bucks Herald.

Worked as writer and news editor, and then as a freelance writer for The Spark magazine from 1995-2009, where I wrote an increasingly widely read column.

Moved to The Source magazine in 2009.

One day I will get around to uploading 14 years of columns onto this blog.

I’ve also had edited the magazines for the Soil Association‘s Living Earth magazine (1999-2001), the Natural Environment Research Council and for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council , a job that convinced me that organic and holistic should always be the first route of research. What a shame that government and big business does not see it this way.

More recently I’ve been working for the wonderfully visionary Neville Fay of Treework Environmental Practice, probably the most forward thinking holistic tree consultants in the UK and maybe even the world.