Car use takes a huge toll on our health and on the planet. We need to kick our addiction to driving
George Monbiot
George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books Heat: how to stop the planet burning; The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain; as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
During seven years of investigative journeys in Indonesia, Brazil and East Africa, he was shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.
In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement. He was hospitalised by security guards, who drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle bone. He helped to found The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country, including 13 acres of prime real estate in Wandsworth belonging to the Guinness corporation and destined for a giant superstore. The protesters beat Guinness in court, built an eco-village and held onto the land for six months.
He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics) and East London (environmental science). He is currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize for his screenplay The Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award.
In summer 2007 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex and an honorary fellowship by Cardiff University.
Consumerism occupies a sacred and inviolable space, while the wonders of the living world are dispensable
Corporate lobbyists and their captive governments try to wear down our resistance with one fake trade treaty after another
The fake grassroots campaign run by grouse shooters is just one instance of the way democracy is being bypassed
The media largely relegate the greatest challenge facing humanity to footnotes as industry and politicians hurtle us towards systemic collapse of the planet
To this government, “taking back control” means handing Britain to a different set of foreign powers
The more urgent the environmental crisis becomes, the less we hear about it
If we saw it anywhere else, we would recognise our political funding system as utterly corrupt
The inquiry made it as clear as its terms allowed that Tony Blair committed the crime of aggression. Can he now be held to account?
The Labour Party can survive, but only if it’s prepared to form an alliance with other parties