Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by George Monbiot
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British writer George Monbiot.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.
Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.
Defending the planet means changing the world.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
David Cameron's government criminalised squatting in empty homes. This too was previously a civil matter. Thousands of homeless people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Some have been imprisoned for using property abandoned by its owners.
On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.
We should seek to love our lives and live fully, but not to extend them indefinitely. We should love our children exuberantly, but not cling to them or curtail their freedoms. We should treasure the material world without seeking to own and control it.
The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.
The age-old mistake, which has stunted countless lives, is the assumption that because physical hardship in childhood makes you physically tough, emotional hardship must make you emotionally tough.
As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.
I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?
For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.
Rather than allowing Roma, Travellers and homeless people to be picked off, all those of us who fear the criminalisation of trespass should join forces with them, protecting their rights while we defend our own.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.
Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.
There are, I believe, three steps to overcoming fear: name it, normalise it, socialise it.
When expressions of emotion are dangerous, and when you are constantly told that this terrible thing is being done for your own good, you quickly learn to hide your true feelings, even from yourself.
For some of Britain's most powerful people, hunting and shooting are primordial rights, and any challenge to them is treated as illegitimate. They assert ownership not only of the land but also of the social relationships surrounding it.
Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars.
New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.
The government argues that without a price, the living world is accorded no value, so irrational decisions are made. By costing nature, you ensure that it commands the investment and protection that other forms of capital attract.
While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I've done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.
If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don't invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.
I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can't live with it through every hour of every day.
Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.
Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.
Farming and fishing are the major causes of the collapse of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Meat - consumed in greater quantities by the rich than by the poor - is the strongest cause of all.
A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment - not only to other people, but also to the natural world.
While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.
When you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, your condition is ranked on the Gleason Score, which measures its level of aggression. Mine is graded at seven out of 10. But this doesn't tell me where I stand in general.
I believe resilience is the most useful human quality, and I've sought to cultivate it, but in 2019 I felt my resolve begin to weaken at times as it has never done before.
The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury.
If I could turn back the clock, magically deleting my prostate cancer, the surgery I needed and its complications, would I do so? It seems an odd question. But I find it surprisingly hard to answer.
Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.
Until fishing is properly regulated and contained, we should withdraw our consent. Save your plastic bags by all means, but if you really want to make a difference, stop eating fish.
We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags.
As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.
We have a wider political and economic system in which ancient, landed power still carries immense weight. There is nothing some landowners would like more than to set the police on those who dare to venture into their vast estates.
Healthy populations of predatory crabs and fish protect the carbon in salt marshes, as they prevent herbivorous crabs and snails wiping out the plants that hold the marshes together.
If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect.
Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces - the afterthoughts of urban design.
Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution.
One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.
If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.
Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.
When I kayak in Cardigan Bay, in Wales, what I hope to find above all else is dolphins. Sometimes I do, and these days are the waymarks of my life.
Surplus money allows some people to exercise inordinate power over others: in the workplace; in politics; and above all in the capture, use and destruction of the planet's natural wealth.
Sometimes I wonder whether anything is learned in conservation, or whether the big NGOs are for ever destined to follow a circular track, endlessly repeating their mistakes.
Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.
Landowners, farmers and gamekeepers, though they comprise a small minority of the rural population, claim to speak for everyone, and dismiss those who challenge them as interfering urbanites.
Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth's systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways.
After my cancer diagnosis this year, I was offered a choice of treatments. I wanted to make an informed decision. This meant reading scientific papers. Had I not used the stolen material provided by Sci-Hub, it would have cost me thousands.
In talking about my cancer with family and friends, I feel the love that I know will get me through this. The old strategy of suffering in silence could not have been more misguided.
What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.
Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible.
Those who deny their own feelings tend to deny other people's.
The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.
History shows that attacks on general freedoms often begin with an attack on the freedom of a minority. It teaches us that we should never allow a government to divide and rule. An attack on one is an attack on all.
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