George Monbiot: Surrounded by fear
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 17 August 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Humans face a series of interlinked existential challenges. How do we feed a global population heading towards ten billion? Can it be done without degrading ecosystems and exacerbating climate change to a calamitous extent? Stephen Sackur interviews writer and environmental activist George Monbiot, who has spent decades addressing these questions and framing radical answers. Why are so many politicians and voters seemingly unwilling to listen?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:04.4 | My guest today is a writer and environmental activist who has spent decades warning that we humans are doing calamitous damage to our planet. |
| 0:13.3 | In George Mombio's view, only a radical rethink of our political and economic systems and priorities can save us from irreversible self-harm. |
| 0:22.3 | Interesting then that Monbeio himself comes from a privileged establishment background. |
| 0:26.7 | His father was descended from French aristocrats and was a senior figure in the British Conservative Party. |
| 0:32.3 | His mother was a committed conservative too. |
| 0:34.5 | George, though, has spent his adult life committed to environmental journalism and |
| 0:39.8 | campaigning, constantly questioning the status quo. One of his most successful books made the case for |
| 0:46.1 | rewilding landscapes despoiled by human activity. His most recent book, Regenesis, is a passionate call for a complete rethink of global food production. |
| 0:57.9 | Farming, as we know it, is unsustainable, he says. |
| 1:01.1 | Livestock needs replacing by microbial protein production. |
| 1:06.1 | Without radical change, our soil will become degraded, our climate catastrophically inhospitable for life as we know it. |
| 1:13.8 | His is a powerful voice, but how good is he at persuading his audience? |
| 1:19.3 | Well, he joins me now. |
| 1:20.8 | George Mombio, welcome to Hard Talk. |
| 1:23.1 | Thanks, Stephen. |
| 1:23.7 | You have been a campaigner and writer on environmental issues for decades, warning about the toxic |
| 1:30.6 | relationship between human beings and our planet. I just wonder how you prioritize. How do you decide |
| 1:39.0 | where to focus? It's very hard. I mean, every week when I'm writing a column for The Guardian, for instance, or making a video, I have a choice of about 20 different topics that I could latch on to. It's very frightening. I mean, to be environmentally aware, to have an environmental education is, as the great writer Aldo Leopold put it, to live in a world of wounds. |
| 2:01.4 | You're surrounded by grief, you're surrounded by the pain of what you're seeing, |
| 2:05.5 | and surrounded by fear also. |
| 2:07.8 | I mean, it's not easy to see how we're going to get through this century, |
... |
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