171 Quotes by George Monbiot

As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.

If our grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems, and the land currently used to grow feed for livestock was used for grains, beans, fruit, nuts and vegetables for humans, this switch would allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon.

While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.

If we want to prevent both climate and ecological catastrophes, the key task is to minimise the amount of land we use to feed ourselves, while changing the way the remaining land is farmed. Instead, governments almost everywhere pour public money into planetary destruction.

Brexit, for all its likely harms, represents an opportunity to pay landowners and tenants to do something completely different, rather than spending yet more public money on trashing our life-support systems.

There is plenty of housing - for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?