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.
... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.
The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods.
I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' ...Nobody knows how it can be like that.
I think of rivers, of tides. Forests and water gushing out. Rain and lightning. Rocks and shadows. All of these are in me.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.
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