Explore Quotes by George Monbiot

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.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity - need fail for everything to slide.

We can expect commercial enterprises to attempt whatever lawful ruses they can pull off. It is up to society, represented by government, to stop them, through the kind of regulation that has so far been lacking.

Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.

Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces - the afterthoughts of urban design.

Yes, the car is still useful - for a few people it's essential. It would make a good servant. But it has become our master, and it spoils everything it touches.

There are, I believe, three steps to overcoming fear: name it, normalise it, socialise it.

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.

As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.

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.

While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.

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.

Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.

For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse.

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.

Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.

Emotionally damaged men all too often rip apart their own lives, and those of their partners and children. I see both physical fitness and emotional strength as virtues, but they are acquired by entirely different means.

As some of us can testify, the viciousness of the lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the publications that amplify their message, knows no limits. As we have already seen, they treat even children as fair game.

What I love about natural climate solutions is that we should be doing all these things anyway. Instead of making painful choices and deploying miserable means to a desirable end, we can defend ourselves from disaster by enhancing our world of wonders.

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.

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.