#monbiot

[outsiderlookinginward]

Saving Sir David Attenborough

Saving Sir David Attenborough

Few people have the respect that enables them to speak to the world and be heard. (more…)

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[usanewsgoogle]

The town that’s found a potent cure for illness - community | George Monbiot | Opinion

The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community | George Monbiot | Opinion

It may, if the outcomes get up, be some of the dramatic medical breakthroughs of current a long time. It may remodel remedy regimes, save lives, and save well being companies a fortune. Is it a drug? A tool? A surgical process? No, it’s a newfangled intervention referred to as community. This week the outcomes from a trial within the Somerset town of Frome are printed informally, within the…

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[theunderliner]

The infrastructure of marketing and media helps us not to see, not to think, not to connect our spots of perception to create a moral worldview upon which we can act. ... Most people subconsciously collaborate in this evasion. It protects them from either grief or cognitive dissonance. To be aware of the wonder and enchantment of the world, its astonishing creatures and complex interactions, and to be aware simultaneously of the remarkably rapid destruction of almost every living system, is to take on a burden of grief that is almost unbearable. This is what the great conservationist Aldo Leopold meant when he wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”

George Monbiot, The Unseen World, Monbiot

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[theunderliner]

Words encode values that are subconsciously triggered when we hear them. When certain phrases are repeated, they can shape and reinforce a worldview, making it hard for us to see an issue differently. Advertisers and spin doctors understand this all too well: they know that they can trigger certain responses by using certain language. But many of those who seek to defend the living planet seem impervious to this intelligence. ... Why do those who seek to protect the living planet – and who were doubtless inspired to devote their lives to it through the same sense of wonder and reverence – so woefully fail to capture these values in the way they name the world?

George Monbiot, Forget 'the environment': we need new words to convey life's wonders, The Guardian

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[theunderliner]

[In the capitalist] mindset, rainforests and ancient woodlands, coral reefs and wild rivers, local markets and lively communities, civic life and public space are nothing but unrealised opportunities for development. Where we see the presence of beauty, tranquillity and wonder, they see the absence of palm oil plantations and soybean deserts, container ports and mega dams, shopping malls and 12-lane highways. For them, there is no point of arrival, just an endless escalation of transit. ... Nowhere is a place in its own right: everywhere is a resource waiting to be exploited. No one is a person in their own right; everyone is a worker, consumer or debtor whose potential for profit generation has yet to be realised. Satiety, well-being, peace: these are antithetical to globalised growth, which demands constant erasure and replacement. ... If you are happy, you are an impediment to trade. Your self-possession must be extinguished.

George Monbiot, Game of Chicken, Monbiot

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[undertheyasmintree]

Denial is everywhere. I have come to believe that it’s an intrinsic component of our humanity, an essential survival strategy.

George Monbiot, via georgemonbiot.com

[theunderliner]

It is in the powder of shattered communities that anti-politics swirls, raising towering dust devils of demagoguery and extremism. ... When people are atomised and afraid, they feel driven to defend their own interests against other people’s. In other words, they are pushed away from intrinsic values such as empathy, connectedness and kindness, and towards extrinsic values such as power, fame and status. The problem created by the politics of extreme individualism is self-perpetuating.

George Monbiot, All Together Now, Monbiot

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[theunderliner]

If drastic action of the kind envisaged by the Paris agreement on climate change is not taken – ice loss in Antarctica alone could raise sea levels by a meter this century, and by 15 meters in subsequent centuries. Combine this with the melting in Greenland and the thermal expansion of seawater, and you discover that many of the world’s great cities are at existential risk. ... The climatic disruption of crucial agricultural zones – in North and Central America, the Middle East, Africa and much of Asia – presents a security threat that could dwarf all others. The civil war in Syria, unless resolute policies are adopted, looks like a glimpse of a possible global future. ... These crises will be bigger than our capacity to respond to them. They could lead to the rapid and radical simplification of society, which means, to put it brutally, the end of civilisations and many of the people they support. If this happens, it will amount to the greatest crime ever committed. And members of Trump’s proposed cabinet are among the leading perpetrators. ... In their careers so far, they have championed the fossil fuel industry while contesting the measures intended to prevent climate breakdown. They appear to have considered the need of a few exceedingly rich people to protect their foolish investments for a few more years, weighed it against the benign climatic conditions that have allowed humanity to flourish, and decided that the foolish investments are more important.

George Monbiot, The Pollution Paradox, Monbiot

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