Top 15 George Monbiot Quotes

As a general rule, though there are dissidents, fisheries science is not so much an academic discipline as a branch of accountancy. It works on behalf of government and industry, and has many failures to its name: frequently setting higher catch rates – often with unjustified precision – than fish populations can sustain. Even so, governments ... routinely set quotas higher than the scientists recommend. Then they fail to enforce the rules, ensuring that even more fish than they allow are taken. Then everyone wonders why fish populations collapse. Sorry, not populations, "stocks". Fish, in this schema, exist only to be exploited.

Fisheries science asks: "How many fish can we keep taking?" Marine ecology asks: "What would living systems look like if we stopped?" Even practitioners often mix them up.

The new government now seeks to address one grim Tory legacy, our bursting prisons, by releasing prisoners – including violent offenders – early. At the same time it fails to address or even mention another and even worse inheritance: the jailing of entirely peaceful people seeking to prevent existential disaster. Perhaps the prisons can be emptied of violent criminals so they can be refilled with environmentalists.

[P]erhaps the most pernicious innovation was to shut down crucial legal defences. One attorney general removed the defence of proportionality; another removed the defence of lawful excuse. This means that environmental activists can no longer explain their motives to a jury. They have to be tried as though they were mindless vandals, inconveniencing people for kicks, rather than seeking to prevent, at great cost to themselves, the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced. Some protesters have sought to explain themselves regardless, and have as a result been imprisoned for contempt of court.

According to Google's news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Phillip Schofield, the British television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world’s major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk.

In some cases, the cycle plays out in one place. Florida, for example, is one of the US states most prone to climate disaster, especially rising seas and hurricanes. But its governor, Ron DeSantis, is building his bid for the presidency on the back of climate denial.

As the impacts of our consumption kick in thousands of miles away, and people come to our borders desperate for refuge from a crisis they played almost no role in causing – a crisis that might involve real floods and real droughts – the same political forces announce, without a trace of irony, that we are being "flooded" or "sucked dry" by refugees, and millions rally to their call to seal our borders.

I cannot say that Malm is wrong, and that non-violent action is more likely to succeed. After all, none of us have been here before. But if you are pushing other people towards decades in prison while risking a backlash that would close down the last possibility of success, you need to be pretty confident that the strategy will work. I have no such confidence.

Fascism has been famously described as "a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place". You don't have to succeed in generating a new movement committed to a campaign of violence to create a monster much bigger than you are: a monster that will close down the last chance of saving Earth systems. If you are going to take a physical shot at capitalism, you had better not miss.

Our demands are – and have to be – more complex than any that have gone before.

If you are holding a virtual gun to someone's head, you need to know exactly what you are demanding and whether they can deliver it.

[On COP27 held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt] The rich world's governments arrived at the conference in Egypt saying "it's now or never". They left saying "how about never?". We sail through every target and objective, red line and promised restraint towards a future in which the possibility of anyone’s existence starts to dwindle towards zero.

All of Earth’s systems are complex, which means they do not respond to change in linear and steady ways. They absorb stress up to a certain point, then suddenly collapse. If one goes down, it can trigger the collapse of others: during previous mass extinctions, collapse seems to have cascaded from one ecosystem and Earth system to the next.

The bigger and more established an organisation becomes the more timid and conformist it seems to get, until it's almost indistinguishable from the interests it should be confronting. In this age of environmental crisis and collapse, of government lies and corporate power, we need our nature defenders to rise like lions after slumber. Instead, they queue at the abattoir gate like sedated lambs.

Let's have what many people were calling for long before this disaster hit: a green new deal. But please let’s stop describing it as a stimulus package. We have stimulated consumption too much over the past century, which is why we face environmental disaster. Let us call it a survival package, whose purpose is to provide incomes, distribute wealth and avoid catastrophe, without stoking perpetual economic growth. Bail out the people, not the corporations. Bail out the living world, not its destroyers. Let's not waste our second chance.