Everything about George Monbiot totally explained
George Joshua Richard Monbiot (born
27 January,
1963) is a
journalist,
author,
academic and
environmental and
political activist in the
United Kingdom who writes a weekly column for
The Guardian newspaper. He is the
patron of the UK student campaign network
People & Planet.
Family
Monbiot's father, Raymond Geoffrey Monbiot, was the deputy chairman of the
Conservative Party and Chairman of the National Convention. His mother Rosalie, the elder daughter of
Roger Gresham Cooke,
M.P. is a Conservative councillor who led
South Oxford district council for a decade. His father was the son of Maurice F. Monbiot, the
Belgian born
maitre d' of the
Trocadero restaurant in
London owned by
J. Lyons and Co., whose French-born father Raymond was the Trocadero's restaurant manager. Maurice F. Monbiot married Ruth Margaret Salmon, only daughter of Henry "Harry" Salmon,
J.P., chairman of
J. Lyons and Co., and Lena Gluckstein. Ruth Margaret Salmon was first cousin of both of the maternal grandparents of
Nigella Lawson and
Dominic Lawson therefore George Monbiot is their double third and fourth cousin. His great-grandparents Henry "Harry" Salmon and Lena Gluckstein were themselves first cousins through the Gluckstein family, co-founders of J. Lyons and Co.
Monbiot is married to Angharad Penrhyn Jones with whom he's one daughter, Hanna, and they live in
Machynlleth, Wales.
Education and career
He was educated at
Stowe School in
Buckinghamshire, where he won an Open Scholarship to
Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read
Zoology. 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.
On graduating, he joined the
BBC Natural History Unit as a radio producer, making natural history and environmental programmes. He transferred within the BBC to the
World Service, where he worked briefly as a current affairs producer and presenter, before leaving to research and write his first book.
Working as an
investigative journalist he travelled in
Indonesia,
Brazil and
East Africa. His activities led to him being made
persona non grata in several countries and being sentenced to life imprisonment
in absentia in Indonesia.
In these places he was also shot at, beaten up by military police, 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 attacked by security guards, who drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle metatarsal bone. His injuries left him in hospital. He was an active member of the
Pure Genius!! campaign and co-founded
The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country. Its first notable success was in 1997, when it occupied thirteen
acres (five
hectares) of prime real estate on the river in London on which owners
Diageo intended to build a superstore. The protesters beat Diageo in court, built an "eco-village" and held on to the land for six months.
Among his best-known articles are his critique of
David Bellamy's climate science, his description of an encounter with a police torturer in Brazil, his attack on libertarian interpretations of genetics his discussion of the ethics of outsourcing, and his attack on the politics of
Bob Geldof and
Bono.
Solutions to control the climate
Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat
global warming, Monbiot asserts that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" and that there's little time for debate or objections to a raft of emergency action he believes will stop climate change, including: setting targets on greenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a 'personal carbon ration'; new building regulations with houses built to German
passivhaus standard; banning
incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights and other inefficient technologies; constructing large offshore
wind farms, replacing the national gas grid with a
hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using
public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric
car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; closing down all out-of-town superstores and replace them with warehouses and a delivery system.
Monbiot purchased a
Renault Clio (diesel) after moving to a small town in mid-Wales in 2007, leading to charges of hypocrisy. Similarly he's also travelled through
Canada and the United States, campaigning on climate change and promoting his book. He contends that this travel was justifiable as it sought to boost the case for much greater carbon cuts there.
Published works
George Monbiot’s first book was
Poisoned Arrows (1989), a work of investigative travel journalism exposing the transmigration programme funded by the
Suharto government and the
World Bank, and the devastating effects on both the migrants and the
indigenous people of
West Papua. It was followed by
Amazon Watershed (1991) which documented expulsions of Brazilian peasant farmers from their land and followed them thousands of miles across the forest to the territory of the
Yanomami Indians, and showed how timber bought in Britain was being stolen from indigenous and biological reserves in
Brazil. His third book,
No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994), documented the seizure of land and cattle from
nomadic people in
Kenya and the
Tanzania, by - among other forces - game parks and safari tourism.
In 2000, George Monbiot published
Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. The book examines the role of corporate power within the
United Kingdom, on both a local and national level, and argues that corporate involvement in politics is a serious threat to democracy. Subjects discussed in the book include the building of the
Skye Bridge, corporate involvement in the
National Health Service, the role of business in university research and the conditions which influence the granting of
planning permission.
Monbiot’s fifth book,
The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, was published in 2003. The book is an attempt to set out a positive manifesto for change for the
global justice movement. Monbiot critiques
anarchism and
Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world’s inequalities must be rooted in a democratic parliamentary system. The four main changes to
global governance which Monbiot argues for are a democratically-elected
world parliament which would pass resolutions on international issues; a democratised
United Nations General Assembly to replace the unelected
UN Security Council; the proposed
International Clearing Union which would automatically discharge
trade deficits and prevent the accumulation of debt; and a
fair trade organisation which would regulate
world trade in a way that protects the economies of poorer countries.
The book also discusses ways in which these ideas may practically be achieved. Monbiot treads the path of a revolutionary, urging those who suffer the consequences of a global inequality predicated on developing world debt and subservience to utilise this debt and effectively hold the developed world to ransom. He posits that the United States and Western European states are heavily dependent on the existence of this debt, and that when faced with a choice between releasing the developing world from debt and the collapse of the global economy, their internal economic interests will dictate that they opt for the "soft landing" option. However, Monbiot emphasises that he doesn't present the manifesto as a “final or definitive” answer to global inequalities but intends that it should open debate and stresses that those who reject it must offer their own solutions. He argues that ultimately the
global justice movement “must seek [...] to provide a coherent programme of alternatives to the concentrated power of the dictatorship of vested interests.”
Monbiot’s most recent book,
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, published in 2006, focuses on the issue of
climate change. In this book, Monbiot argues that a 90% reduction in
carbon emissions is necessary in developed countries in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. He then sets out to demonstrate how such a reduction could be achieved within the United Kingdom, without a significant fall in
living standards, through changes in housing, power supply and transport. Monbiot concludes that such changes are possible but they'd require considerable political will.
Honours
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 2007, he was given an honorary doctorate by the
University of Essex and an honorary fellowship by
Cardiff University. In November 2007 his book
Heat was awarded the Premio Mazotti, an Italian book prize. But he was denied the money given with the prize because he refused to travel to Venice to collect it in person, arguing that it wasn't a good enough reason to justify flying.
Politics
A member of the
Green Party, he was involved initially with the
Respect political party, but he broke with the organisation when it chose to run candidates against the Green Party in the 2004 election to the European Parliament.
Miscellany
- The pejorative political epithet "Moonbat" is often used by various political commentators to mock Monbiot. The epithet was coined in 2002 by Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net, a libertarian weblog. The claim that the term was originally used as a play on Monbiot's surname has been denied by de Havilland - the full epithet being "barking moonbat". Seemingly, Monbiot himself doesn't mind.
Bibliography
Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey Through Indonesia (1989, Abacus) ISBN 0-7181-3153-3
Amazon Watershed (1991, Abacus) ISBN 0-7181-3428-1
Mahogany Is Murder: Mahogany Extraction from Indian Reserves in Brazil (1992) ISBN 1-85750-160-8
No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994, Picador) ISBN 0-333-60163-7
Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000, Macmillan) ISBN 0-333-90164-9
Anti-capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (2001, Bookmarks) ISBN 1-898876-78-9 contributor
Europe Inc.: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power (2003, Pluto Press) foreword by George Monbiot, ISBN 0-7453-2163-1
The Age of Consent (2003, Flamingo) ISBN 0-00-715042-3
Manifesto for a New World Order (2004, The New Press) ISBN 1-56584-908-6
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (September 2006, Allen Lane) ISBN 0-7139-9923-3 U.S. edition (April 2007, South End Press) ISBN 978-0-89608-779-8
Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice (March 2008, Atlantic Books) ISBN 978-1843546566Further Information
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