George Monbiot

George Monbiot is "Honorary Professor at the Department of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at the University of East London. Monbiot is author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He is active in the ecology movement and helped to found the land rights campaign 'The Land is Ours'. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper and is a ZNet Commentator."[1]

The Curious Journey of George Monbiot

'The fight we're engaged in has been going on for a thousand years. When the Normans first came to this country, this land was a free land.'

The author of these lines was perhaps motivated by a sense of guilt, since for the greater part of those 1000 years, the Monbiots have been on the side of the landowners. Originally called Beaumont, the French Ducs de Coutard changed their name after fleeing the wrath of their peasant tenants during the French Revolution to avoid discovery by St Just’s agents. Today Monbiot is trustee for a farm in Somerset, ‘Tinker’s Bubble’.

George Monbiot, 35 columnist on the Guardian newspaper admits guiltily ‘I had been to public school and my father was an industrialist and an active member of the Conservative Party’ (DiY Culture, p181). Monbiot sr was in 1995 head of the Conservative Party’s Trade and Industry forum (Independent, 9 May 1995)

According to the Daily Telegraph:

‘It must have been a bitter disappointment to Mr Monbiot's parents that their son grew up a subversive. His father Raymond, an Oxfordshire businessman, was chairman of Michael Heseltine's constituency Conservative association until he resigned in dismay over his member's leadership challenge to Margaret Thatcher. His mother Rosalie is another staunch Tory who led South Oxford district council for a decade.’

Daily Telegraph 25 May 1996

By his own account Raymond Monbiot worked his way up through the firm, starting as a production trainee, moving on to sales, then marketing before becoming Managing Director of a succession of subsidiary companies including ‘International Consultants’, after leaving Westminster College and the London Business School. As well as being active in the Conservative Party Monbiot senior wrote and lectured on management at the College of Marketing – skills his son has put to good use since.

Raymond Monbiot’s ill-gotten gains put young George through Stowe public school and paid for a home for Rosalie and three children in Henley-on-Thames – ‘a large country house with a garden that backed onto Peppard Common’ (Genevieve Fox, Independent, 9 May 1995). In his book Monbiot senior describes ‘the Wife’s Role’ as ‘bringing up the family with a sense of values and trying hard not to let them get soft and spoiled on the fruits of their parents’ success’. Continuing in this vein Raymond Monbiot betrays a sense of disappointment with his offspring as he allots Rosalie the role of ‘comforting her husband when her children let him down’ (How To Manage Your Boss, Scope Books 1980, p101). To Genevieve Fox, Monbiot said ‘My Dad is a decent bloke, a moral bloke … While in some ways’ and here his voice falters ‘we look at the world in fairly similar terms, we cover it from completely different directions.’

But in fact George’s environmentalism is a lot closer to his parents’ Conservatism than one might suspect. Rosalie Monbiot was leader of the South Oxfordshire District Council from 1982 to 1989. Under her leadership, the Council placed an unprecedented emphasis on environmental conservation, developing strong ties with Oxfordshire's Countryside Commission, Forestry Commission and Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group.

In her first year as leader, the Council was awarded the prestigious Environmental Award by the Oxford Preservation Trust, in recognition of its efforts to preserve Nuneham Courtenay village. Every subsequent year, the Council's Annual Report lists an increasing number of designated conservation areas and tree preservation orders.

In her second year as leader Rosalie Monbiot proudly states that 73 planning applications have been rejected that year, explaining that '[T]he planning policies adopted by the Council have been endorsed as being proper for an area which is predominantly one of outstanding natural beauty.' (South Oxfordshire District Council Annual Report 1983-1984, p5)

The former deputy-head prefect, in his own words emerged ‘a rather naïve and gormless natural historian’ from Brasenose college in the eighties. While other Oxford Students were throwing themselves into the campaign to support striking miners, Monbiot was chosen to read a paper to the ‘Brazen noses’ of the Pater Society, to celebrate their 750th meeting, on ‘Evolution and the Image of God’. In the speech Monbiot wrestled with the question of whether modern evolutionary theory ‘leaves any room, or need, for the existence of God’. Amidst the despair of the ‘selfish gene’, Monbiot glimpses redemption in ‘altruism with a small “a”’ asking whether it ‘could not be seen as an image, unfulfilled and now distorted, of an Altruism, capital “A”, or Love, or God’. Anticipating an objection, Monbiot adds the qualification that not all ‘uncommon motivations’ are Godly with the example that the apologist for Indian poverty Mother Theresa is Godly, but Irish Republican Hunger Striker Bobby Sands is not. Clearly Monbiot’s much-touted affection for the wretched of the Earth stopped short when they had the temerity to fight back against their oppression.

Monbiot concludes his religious speculations with the characteristically precocious conclusion, immature even for a 22-year-old: ‘Could Jesus have been a Dinosaur? The answer, to the theological biologist, is “yes”.’ The religious motif of Monbiot’s radicalism persists – his girlfriend Susan Hawley works for Christian Aid – though he has since swapped God the Holy Father for Gaia the Earth Mother.

After leaving Brasenose with a 2.1 in Zoology, Monbiot worked as a producer at the BBC’s natural history unit in Bristol before becoming a presenter of current affairs programmes for the World Service (presumably the time when he garnered his extensive connections in the media and the Foreign Office). In Monbiot’s own telling of his radical conversion, ‘painfully slowly, the penny began to drop’ when he toured the poverty-stricken regions of Irian Jaya and Kenya. Identifying the problem of poverty with the rapacious demand for Mahogany and other luxuries in the West, Monbiot was drawn to environmental campaigns like the roads protests for their anti-consumption message. ‘At first, I didn’t really understand what was going on, or how it related to me’, but at the Twyford Down Camp amongst the Dongas Tribe, the adolescent moraliser at last found the sense of altruistic community and Christian parsimony he craved – all repackaged in a suitably contemporary environmental crust.

For all his new found enthusiasm for the DiY culture of the environmentalists Monbiot could not restrain the marketing and media habits learned from his father and as a correspondent for the BBC’s World Service. ‘Loud, bossy and incapable of holding my tongue, at the same time extremely excited … I became an object of suspicion.’ Monbiot was denounced as a ‘Media Tart’ by his erstwhile allies in The Green Anarchist, Oxfiend, Contraflow and Class War. ‘I was, some believed, hijacking the movement, trying to replace its radicalism with a reformist, even collaborationist agenda, using my contacts and access to the media to launch a hierarchical coup’. Monbiot’s conflict with the more radical fringe of the environmental movement came to a head with a debate within Earth First!, with a row over tactics. Green Anarchist asked: “Are we seeing another Greenpeace in infancy (Paul Watson certainly saw that sellout) with its own set of media presentable leaders such as self-styled EF! spokesperson George Monbiot, who cries for land reform but never takes any back?” The Green Anarchists continued:

“We remember his [Monbiot’s] past dismay and criticism at criminal damage and direct action at Timbmet, even at EF! itself. Like so many of his kind, he is nothing but a bangwagoner whose circle of friends include the hierarchy of FoE and Guardian Green news pimp and Small World partner John Vidal, and whose credentials and class fit perfectly with his own. If careerist fools want to join the mainstream, let them do it – but damn them if they're going to drag the rest of us down with them.” (Green Anarchist 39)

Since being exposed as a toff, Monbiot has tried to re-establish his radical credentials by working twice as hard to prove his unqualified commitment to the cause – hence his many articles against such ‘traitors’ to the environment. Monbiot attacked 'big conservation groups' for attempting the sequestration of resources' and 'aligning themselves with power against the powerless'. He compared Worldwide Fund for Nature and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to the Nazis, pointing out that the Nazis too had their environmentalists, like the champion of the Serengti Park, Professor Bernhard Gzrimek. (Guardian, 6 August 1997) Monbiot has adopted the role of hunting out the conspirators and doubters with the same zeal with which his crusty allies exposed him before.

His fingers burnt, Monbiot retreated from his active involvement confining his activities to ‘a few backroom tasks’ and ‘concentrating instead on my journalism, much of which supports the theoretical framework within which the direct action movements work’. But spurned by the activists Monbiot found solace elsewhere. His high-profile advocacy might have embarrassed the activists, but it impressed the establishment, in the shape of Sir Crispin Tickell who became his mentor. Tickell engaged Monbiot as a fellow at Green College, where Sir Crispin was Warden from 1990-97. Monbiot and Sir Crispin enjoy fossil-hunting together, and he offers ‘many great thanks to Oliver Tickell, Crispin Tickell and the staff of Green College’ in his book No Man’s Land. Tickell jr is a co-trustee of the ‘Tinker’s Bubble’ farm: (‘this land IS OUR land’). In Sir Crispin, Monbiot has found a substitute father figure he can really look up to, a real establishment figure, old money, untainted by trade.

Since leaving the diplomatic service, Sir Crispin has been free to advance environmentalist agenda as Warden of Green College, where Monbiot is a fellow. Cecil Green founded the College in 1979 with the millions made developing arms for the US military, like the Shrike Missile, at Texas Instruments. Green first sought to perfume his blood money with medical research, but under Sir Crispin’s guidance the college has developed its environmentalist wing - hence George Monbiot’s recruitment. At Green College, Monbiot turned his office into an organising centre for Green activists. ‘There are some serious things wrong with academia in Oxford today but there are little oases of good sense in the middle of it’ Monbiot told Genevieve Fox, adding ‘Green College is one.’ Green College Warden Sir Crispin’s good environmentalist sense did not prevent him from seconding the motion that Oxford University resist the protests of local Green Party activists and accept the funding for the Wafic Said Business school from the Saudi arms trader.

The curious friendship between Sir Crispin Tickell and George Monbiot finds both echoing each other’s concerns. Monbiot’s travel journalism continues to direct its fire on governments in the Third World, while pretending to a sympathy for the poorest of the poor, while Tickell recently popped up as a government advisor opposing the plan to build thousands of new working class homes. Between them they represent the coalescence of elite Conservatism and middle class moralising activism that is the modern environmental movement.

URL: www.monbiot.com

See Monbiot's page at ZNet for current and archived articles.

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Other SourceWatch Resources

• Living Marxism
• parecon

External Links

• George Monbiot, "The Revolution Has Been Televised", The Guardian, December 18, 1997.
• George Monbiot, "Far Left of Far Right?", Prospect Magazine, November 1998.
• George Monbiot, America Is a Religion. US Leaders Now See Themselves as Priests of a Divine Mission to Rid the World of Its Demons, Guardian/UK, July 28, 2003.
• George Monbiot, Post-9/11 America Is a Religion, Alternet, July 30, 2003.
• Vince Caughley, Talking about a global democratic revolution, Socialist Worker, August 8, 2003: "George Monbiot, the prominent British journalist, caused a splash with his recent visit to Australia. ... His call for a global democratic revolution to address the enormous inequalities in our world really struck a chord. The people who packed out his meetings were keen to engage in the debate about how to bring about such a transformation."
• George Monbiot, "Invasion of the Entryists", The Guardian, December 9, 2003.
• George Monbiot and Michael Albert, Movement Building 2004: What Do We Want? An Exchange Between Michael Albert and George Monbiot. On the Occurrence of the Publication of their new books: Albert: "Parecon: Life After Capitalism" and Monbiot: "The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order".