171 Quotes by George Monbiot

The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.

The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there.

Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides; above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumbered and enormous polypi Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. Alfred Lord Tennyson.

It was when I saw these places in the 1980s that I felt called to do something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant trees, I asked myself: what’s the message in the land? What’s the story it’s telling us? My question was: “What’s Nature seeking to do here?” That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination. Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.

Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.

Sheep farming in this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed.

Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.

Evidence supporting James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system – appears, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating.