George Monbiot: So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the...

August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad.

George Monbiot

bad-day mad august

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

George Monbiot

progress speed nature

In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.

George Monbiot

despair people world

The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.

George Monbiot

government powerful taken

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

George Monbiot

wealth hard-work would-be

Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.

George Monbiot

conviction voting arise

Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.

George Monbiot

survival choices people

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.

George Monbiot

climate saint people

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

George Monbiot

ecosystems imagination inspire

Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth's capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

George Monbiot

progress support opposites

Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

George Monbiot

climate-change generations want

Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people.

George Monbiot

differences home thinking

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.

George Monbiot

atheism christian winter

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality

George Monbiot

business reality ideas

We are often told we are materialistic. It seems to me, we are not materialistic enough. We have a disrespect for materials. We use it quickly and carelessly. If were genuinely materialistic people, we would understand where materials come from and where they go to. But, at the moment, the entire global economy seems to be built on the model of digging things up from one hole in the ground on one side of the earth, transporting them around the world, using them for a few days, and sticking them in a hole in the ground on the other side of the world.

George Monbiot

digging disrespect people

Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

George Monbiot

coal nuclear people

We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

George Monbiot

wrecks government easy

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

George Monbiot

hate heart men

If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.

George Monbiot

refugee-crisis choices humanity

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management.

George Monbiot

fighting night country

So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.