I read the British environmentalist George Monbiot’s book on
global warming, Heat: How to stop the planet burning, when it came out
in 2008. I was impressed then, and am impressed on re-reading it now. And I’m
appalled – but not surprised – that the situation he addressed hasn’t changed
much in the interim. Indeed, it is arguably considerably worse. I’ve also been
absorbing some of his more recent work: his books Feral: Rewilding the land,
sea and human life (2013), Out of the Wreckage: A new politics for an
age of crisis (2018), and Regenesis: Feeding the world without devouring
the planet (2022). I encounter his regular column for the Guardian
newspaper, too. He has managed both to generate a considerable following, and to
make himself persona non grata in many circles and in some whole
countries. He must be touching a few raw nerves, which is often a telling sign
and a useful thing. Of course his leftie politics annoys conservative Tories
and the like intensely, and some respond with genuine viciousness to his being
a vegan. Why they should care at all beats me, but you’d think he’d actually
threatened to hang their pet poodle.
Without always agreeing with him, I’ve liked what he says,
and liked the way he says it. I’ll not get embroiled in argument here, but I thought,
like a proper Fair-Minded Person, I should look up some of the criticism he has
attracted. So I Googled away. The first one I read – call them Critic No.1 –
lambastes Monbiot at length for his arguments in Regenesis that the
meat-eating industry is a massive factor in impoverishing soils and causing
damaging climate change. They grudgingly liked the opening chapters, in which
Monbiot, down on his knees in his local communal orchard, expounds on the
astonishing multispecies conglomerate that healthy soil is. (It’s wondrous.) But the critic then claims that Monbiot knows
jack-rabbit about soil science, and accuses him of using only ‘activist’ papers
to support his case. Neither is remotely true, and the critic’s argument,
whatever valid points it might contain, is so badly written, patently
self-contradictory, and tedious that I would have thrown it down in frustration
could one do such a thing with an internet site. No surprise, somehow, that the
critic declines to reveal their identity, but boasts that they founded a
food-processing company. In other words, they are beholden to precisely the
industry Monbiot worries about.
Critic No.2 claims that Monbiot a) is a deluded ‘Romantic’,
b) sees everything in ‘black and white’, and c) is just a shallow
rabble-rouser. All three assertions are patently wrong, not to mention
egregiously ad hominem – and come from someone who works for the energy
industry but can’t write for toffee. I gave up. No doubt there are cogent
criticisms, but these weren’t them. Back to the books, then, and why I believe
them worth reading.
There are several things that I like about Monbiot’s work.
First, he does write well. He is fluent, crystal clear, at times even lyrical.
To be attractive and persuasive apparently riles the hard-core polemicists of
the energy industry no end. To actually love life, to think that natural health
and biodiversity is important, is apparently what attracts the dreadful epithet
‘Romantic’. Critic No.2 seems to think Monbiot wants us all revert to some pristine
and primitive state of Nature, whereas what Monbiot actually advocates is much
more pragmatic and nuanced. In Feral he does propose ‘rewilding’ select
environments in order to save ecosystems from total collapse (and thus help to
save ourselves), and he recommends appropriate reintroduction of
long-extirpated keystone species like wolves, salmon and beavers. But he explicitly
recognises we cannot simplistically return environments to some arbitrary previous
era. Rewilding is “not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to
permit ecological processes to resume” (8). He adds: “While I would argue
against mass rewilding of high-grade farmland because of the threat to global
food supplies, we lose little by allowing nature to persist in small fallow
corners” (124). Arguably, “corners” are not enough, but would be a start. The
above critics wholly miss the subtleties and careful qualifications.
A second thing I like about Monbiot is that he founds his
arguments not just on the scientific facts and figures, which are always
somewhat tentative or partial, subject to change as new evidence emerges, but also
on personal experiences. Unlike his critics, who evince no evident love for
anything beyond their position behind a desk covered in spreadsheets, Monbiot has
trained and worked as a biologist and travels widely – Kenya, the Americas, the
Philippines, Wales – and talks to real people, about whom he writes with
fondness and insight, but by no means uncritically. My favourite of his books, Feral,
is replete with such hands-on experiences. It’s all but an autobiography. In
short, in contrast to defensive industrialists, who tend to throw about empty
business-speak backed up with a blinding plethora of figures, Monbiot is human
and humane, implying that unless improvements are felt by and implemented by
committed individuals, we’ll not get far. Perhaps contradictorily, he also
suggests elsewhere that individual acts – cycling to work, installing a solar
panel – are effectively pointless, since only (inter)nationally-implemented
policies will have the massive impact required. I only half agree: we’re in
this pickle because over time millions of people have made millions of micro-decisions
(to buy an SUV, to eat meat every day, etc etc). Millions of individual
counter-decisions will have to be made, whether forced to by legislation or
not. Might as well start.
Monbiot is keenly aware that no solution is going to suit
every person or situation. He is the very opposite of ‘black-and-white’. He is
neither an outright back-to-nature romantic, though there is that element; nor
a technology-will-fix everything fanatic, though he finds certain new
inventions exciting. He has persistently advocated moves to green energy and to
less mechanistic, poison-dependent farming, but he openly admits that there are
down-sides to both. In Heat, he made reasoned calculations as to how
much energy could in fact be supplied by wind and solar generation, and came up
way short of humanity’s needs. Something more is required. Despite considerable
advances in technology having since been made in some quarters, this remains
largely true. Moreover – as a sobering Al Jazeera documentary, “The dark side
of green energy”, confirms – the new technologies remain dependent on
extractive industries, notably of rare metals, which are themselves
environmentally damaging. Lithium mining is one notable culprit. Nor have we
worked out how to store or recycle any of this new stuff, from battery acids to
nuclear waste to windmill rotor blades, which don’t last long and now lie discarded
in huge ‘cemeteries’ across Europe. Monbiot loves the idea of ‘going local’ in
food production and consumption, loves the communal orchard he helps maintain –
but suggests that in some situations the amount of energy expended and
pollution generated in a localised economy can actually be worse than that
spawned by multinational trade in food, because of the great efficiencies of
scale the big businesses can get.
I like also that Monbiot is always on a learning curve. He’s
full of revelations, many of them revelations to himself. Some discoveries are
beautiful, like the richness of functional soil that he both formally researches
and sensually experiences in the beginning of Regenesis. Other
revelations are dismaying, like just how dysfunctional the United Kingdom’s
environmental policies, safeguards and enforcement are. Monbiot – and his
associate researchers, whose contribution he generously acknowledges – is a
deep researcher. He’s very good at uncovering the layers of obfuscation and
misinformation so much denialist literature draws on. Not that this is always
hard to do, as I discovered when presented with one superficially persuasive
article someone recommended. I simply looked up the author, and found the
intelligent-sounding Institute he belonged to, which turned out to be a bunch
of people partly funded by Exxon, not one of whom was a biologist or
climatologist, several of whom were on the boards of oil companies, and whose self-published
papers all drew on one another. The appearance of scientific cogency and
breadth of reference was rather easily exposed as a sham. Monbiot can’t read
everything, but he does seek out those regarded as the best in the fields
concerned, and the most authoritative summaries available, and then draws
reasonable inferences. He knows how science works, and its limits. What science
overall is good at is weeding out the rubbish or the inaccuracies as better
evidence becomes available. So Monbiot is very prepared to admit that he was
once wrong about certain things, often amusingly at his own expense. In a
recent Guardian column, for example, he self-deprecatingly relates how
he once thought installing a wood-burning heating system in his house was so
much more natural and organic and hip than fossil fuel-based systems – only to belatedly
discover that burning wood is far more toxic and environmentally unsound than
heating your house with gas. (This has been confirmed by numerous studies which
find that wood-burning in London is a serious source of pollution and health
hazards, and bans are looking likely – imagine Lahore and Lagos.) I’m sure many
of us find ourselves caught in these kinds of paradoxes.
It appeals to this retired literature professor, of course,
that Monbiot reads, and illuminates his texts with literary allusions.
It’s a rare scientist and activist who will reference a nineteenth-century
novel (gawd, even half our university literature students won’t!). Heat’s
chapters are all headed by startlingly apt epigraphs drawn from Goethe’s epic
poem Faust, or from its cousin, Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus – the
implication being that humanity has made a ‘Faustian pact’ with the fossil-fuel
industry. We have chosen to sup with what appeared to be a fantastic boon to
mankind (and in many ways it has been) but that has emerged as more of a deceitful
devil liable to drag us all down into an unanticipated hell. Feral
likewise draws on apposite quotations from the poets. The critics wholly ignore
this dimension, homing in on alleged misreadings of figures or statistics. But
there’s a crucial point here: Monbiot knows that most humans operate
fundamentally at the level of the visceral imagination, not of the abstract –
and only imagination is going to help us now. I don’t always agree with his
readings. In Regenesis he places a lot of blame for our current food
crisis on the myth embedded in pastoral poetry – the image of a safe, friendly,
bucolic countryside of pretty meadows and complaisant cows. This, he argues,
has covered up the reality of lethal animal-food industries and their attendant
pollutions. For some, perhaps – but historically the pastoral has also always
been wielded as a critique of urbanisation and over-dependence on sophisticated technology.
The underlying insight, though – that humans tend to behave in accordance with
tropes, myths and stories, rather than empirical evidence or figures printed in
newspapers – surely holds. I therefore like Monbiot’s point, which governs the
structure of the more politically-orientated book, Out of the Wreckage,
that we have habitually operated according to one set of stories – that we
are the centre of the universe, we are technological masters, nature is there
for the taking, and so on – but now need another kind of story and a different set
of metaphors to live by, if we’re going to survive the mess we have landed up
in.
Finally, then, I like the fact that – like other favourite
activist-writers of mine such as Rebecca Solnit and Naomi Klein – Monbiot is
always determinedly upbeat, and always looking for solutions. His critics
somehow fail to see this. I saw him interviewed recently on BBC’s “Hard Talk”
by Stephen Sackur, who accused Monbiot (or relayed the accusation) that he was
“always focussing on the negative”. Monbiot answered testily, “Have you
actually read the book [Regenesis]? Two thirds of it is about
solutions!” He is full of ideas, few of them entirely his own: they are usually
gleaned and developed from people who are actually already doing stuff, whether
it’s getting high farm yields without fertilisers, or generating meat in
laboratories, or rewilding a corner of devastated land, or building homes more
efficiently. He is not alone in either his critiques or his enthusiasms. There
is no pie-in-the-sky stuff here, unlike the more bizarre notions of
‘geoengineering’ tossed about by the technocrats, from artificial carbon
storage to pumping more pollutants into the atmosphere (with heaven
knows what unforeseen consequences) to wrapping the poles in tin foil or
migrating to Mars. Not all Monbiot’s suggestions might work, and he doesn’t
claim any one is a silver bullet. But many strategies in combination, as a
patchwork of appropriate ventures tailored to local conditions, he shows how extensive
and helpful changes might be made. At times I think he is way too sanguine
about evoking the altruistic and cooperative sides of human behaviour on a
sufficiently large scale – but that kind of hopefulness is infinitely
preferable to his critics’ apparent insistence that the mess can somehow be
sorted by doubling down on the very strategies that have caused the mess in the
first place.
At the very least, Monbiot gets you thinking about creative
responses that are already to hand, and is often quite fun to boot. Read him.
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