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.
Interpretation
The quote advocates for the cessation of consuming fish until proper regulations are established to protect marine life.
George Monbiot's quote emphasizes the urgency of addressing overfishing and its detrimental effects on marine ecosystems. By suggesting that individuals refrain from eating fish until effective conservation measures are implemented, he highlights the importance of personal responsibility in environmental activism and encourages a reconsideration of consumer choices to drive meaningful change.
In practice
During a climate change seminar to highlight sustainable practices.
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.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.
Blackberry winter, the time when the hoarforst lies on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost the berries will not set. It is the forerunner of a rich harvest.
. . . We love fog because it shifts old anomalies into the elements surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.
After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.