Right Relation with Tobacco: Decommercialization and Reverence

by | Feb 12, 2026 | Decolonization, Environmental Justice, Environmental Political Theory, Indigenous Peoples, Industrial Epidemics, philosophy of science, Plants, Public Health, Publications, Tobacco Industry

New article out in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science exploring the most controversial plant on Earth. The paradox: Tobacco kills 8+ million people yearly through cigarettes. Yet for Indigenous peoples, it’s sacred — a messenger plant, vehicle of prayer,...

New article out on UNDO.org on ‘The dangers of Big Tobacco’s faux-pharmaceutical rebrand’

by | Mar 27, 2025 | Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, Perverse Incentives, Priorities, Public Health, Publications, Side-effects, Tobacco Industry

This follows up on my article published last year: Hendlin YH, Han EL, Ling PM. Pharmaceuticalisation as the tobacco industry’s endgame. BMJ Global Health. 2024;9(2):e013866. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2023-013866 discussing how “To revamp their image, Big Tobacco relies...

Pharmaceuticalization as the Tobacco Industry’s Endgame

by | Feb 21, 2024 | Conflicts of Interest, death, Discursive Gap, duh, e-waste, Industrial Epidemics, Industry Documents, Perverse Incentives, Priorities, Public Health, Publications, Tobacco Industry

A new article I wrote with colleagues at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has just been published in BMJ Global Health.   It investigates the multi-decade plan of various tobacco...

Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR)

by | Mar 20, 2023 | agroecology, algae, Artificial Everything, Biomimicry, Climate Change, conservation, deep ecology, Interspecies Communication, philosophy of science, Plants, Publications, Systems thinking

How does the race to make algae do tasks for us undermine the ability of those algae to perform their metabolic tasks? My colleagues and I have a new article out looking at the limits of enclosed ecosystems (lab controlled algae breeding for energy/food/oil, etc)....