George Monbiot

“While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.”

“If you or I had lived 500 years ago, our worldview, and the decisions we made as a result, would have been utterly different. Our minds are shaped by our social environment, in particular the belief systems projected by those in power: monarchs, aristocrats and theologians then; corporations, billionaires and the media today.”

“If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.”

“We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags.”

“New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.”

“If commercial fishing were excluded from large areas of the sea, the total catch would be likely, paradoxically, to rise, due to what biologists call the spillover effect.”

“As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.”

“Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.”

“Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.”

“We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.”

“For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.”

“As some of us can testify, the viciousness of the lobby groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, and the publications that amplify their message, knows no limits. As we have already seen, they treat even children as fair game.”

“Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.”

“I do not want to abandon representative democracy. I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy.”

“As SUVs are higher and heavier, they are more likely to kill the people they hit. Driving an SUV in an urban area is an antisocial act.”

“Farmfree production promises a far more stable and reliable food supply that can be grown anywhere, even in countries without farmland. It could be crucial to ending world hunger.”

“I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.”

“David Cameron's government criminalised squatting in empty homes. This too was previously a civil matter. Thousands of homeless people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Some have been imprisoned for using property abandoned by its owners.”

“The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.”

“Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces - the afterthoughts of urban design.”