A Biography of George Monbiot

George Monbiot (born January 27, 1963) is a journalist, author, academic & environmental & political activist in the United Kingdom who writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper. He is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine.

Career
Monbiot was educated at Stowe School, a boys' independent school in Buckinghamshire, & then 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) & 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 & environmental programmes. He transferred within the BBC to the World Service, where he worked briefly as a current affairs producer & presenter, before leaving to research & write his first book.

Working as an investigative journalist he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil & East Africa. His activities led to him being made persona non grata in several countries & being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia. In these places he also claims to have been shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked & 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 claims to have been 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 & 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" & held on to the land for six months.

He is a vocal critic of The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary highly critical of the U.N & the IPCC. Monbiot derided Channel 4's claim that the broadcast of this documentary was 'balanced' by Monbiot's own Dispatches documentary as part of a season on climate change, claiming that his documentary was subject to "a rigorous process of fact-checking", while The Great Global Warming Swindle was not. Monbiot asserts in this exchange with Hamish Mykura, the Head of Religion, Science & History at Channel 4, that his documentary's inclusion in a 'season' was not what was claimed at the time of its commissioning, an argument Mykura uses in his self-defence.

Solutions to control the climate
Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming, Monbiot states that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" & that there is 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 & other unnecessary 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 & road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; close down all out-of-town superstores & replace them with warehouses & a delivery system.

Published works
George Monbiot’s first book was Poisoned Arrows (1989), a work of investigative travel journalism criticising the treatment of the indigenous people of West Papua by the Indonesian government. It was followed by Amazon Watershed which explored the ecological & human costs of the timber industry in Brazil. His third book, No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya & Tanzania, highlighted the struggles of nomadic people in Kenya & the Tanzania, particularly the impact of game parks & 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 & national level, & 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 & 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 & Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world’s inequalities must be rooted in a democratic 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 & prevent the accumulation of debt; & 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 & subservience to utilise this debt & effectively hold the developed world to ransom. He posits that the United States & Western European states are heavily dependent on the existence of this debt, & that when faced with a choice between releasing the developing world from debt & 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 does not present the manifesto as a “final or definitive” answer to global inequalities but intends that it should open debate & 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 & transport. Monbiot concludes that such changes are possible but they would 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 & the OneWorld National Press Award. Prospect magazine listed him in the bonus ballot of The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll.

Politics
Initially, he was involved 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.

Monbiot is married to Angharad Penrhyn Jones with whom he has one daughter, Hanna, & they live in Mid Wales.

He is the patron of the UK student campaign network People & Planet.

Once he noted how some left wingers in a certain group associated with that Channel 4 documentary are very right wing and just seem to be, using left wing arguments for right wing ideas. In many cases that will not be true, and we do not want toet suspicous like some Stalin era thing, but for them it seems very true to many that that it what they are doing and he noted it, very good thing. He also bet with a person global warm,ing was happening, and the righrt winger who dissagreed refused to bet. He is a very good arguer.

This website was written in August 2007

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