Z Needs Your Help!
Our visions of the future are defined, like the film Interstellar, by technological optimism and political defeatism
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.
This bill of corporate rights threatens to blow the sovereignty of parliament unless it can be stopped
You might have imagined that a marine conservation zone would be a zone in which marine life was, well, conserved
To blot people out of existence first you must blot them from your mind
Competition and individualism are forcing us into a devastating Age of Loneliness
The demands of business dominate our politicians and embed inequality. It’s a full-blown assault on democracy
Our consumption is trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce
Let’s bomb the Muslim world – all of it – to save the lives of its people. Surely this is the only consistent moral course?
Perhaps the most arresting fact about the Scottish referendum is this: that there is no newspaper – local, regional or national, English or Scottish – that supports independence except the Sunday Herald
Governments dither on the solution to global warming – but the Montreal protocol is a reminder of a time when they took their hands out of their pockets