Jules Marshall

In a 20-year freelance career I have written about everything from business, science and medicine to travel, live Champions League soccer coverage for UEFA and African witchcraft. It was writing about the Cradle-to-Cradle industrial trend (2009) and Transition Town movements (2011) that prompted me to return to my Human Sciences roots, join Except and focus on writing about sustainability and green issues.

I covered the information technology revolution from the front line for much of the 1990s, for Wired and other magazines around the world. I also documented and took part in the ‘entheogenic renaissance’, writing about the spiritual and therapeutic use of psilocybin (1994), the first European journalist to visit and write about the ayahuasca-using Santo Daime church in the Brazilian Amazon (1995). I was also of the first journalists to cover the radical UK anti-road building protest movement (1996).

I have a degree in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford; this involved the study of humans from the molecular level (e.g. genetics, physiology) to the societal (e.g. anthropology, sociology, urban geography) via the individual level, and our interactions with the biological and cultural environment (ecology, polictics, etc).

I later received a diploma in journalism from the University of Wales, specializing in green politics and environmental reporting. My first job I journalism was for the leading disability rights newspaper in the UK. Encountering the novels of William Gibson prompted me to switch direction and become editor of a monthly computer magazine. This led to an opportunity to move to Amsterdam and edit Electric Word, the precursor to Wired magazine.