Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
Interpretation
The quote highlights the discrepancy between prioritizing financial institutions over environmental protection.
George Monbiot's quote raises a critical question about societal values and priorities. It emphasizes the ease with which governments allocate resources to rescue banks during financial crises while struggling to invest in and protect the biosphere, which is essential for our survival. The stark contrast implies a need to reassess what is deemed valuable and worth saving in our world, suggesting that ecological preservation should be prioritized as much as economic stability.
In practice
In a speech advocating for environmental policy changes.
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.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
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.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy Earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it.
As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.
When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.
When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.