George Monbiot

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Image:George Monbiot.jpg Image:George Monbiot Scotland.jpg George Monbiot (born January 27, 1963) is a journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist in the United Kingdom who writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper.

1 Biography
2 Published Works
3 Bibliography
4 Notes
5 External links

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Biography

Monbiot was educated at Stowe School, Buckinghamshire and then Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Zoology and shared rooms with the historian Niall Ferguson. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics) and East London (environmental science). He is currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University.

Working as an investigative journalist after graduation he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil and East Africa. His activities led to him being made persona non grata in several countries and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia. In these places he was also shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.

In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement. He was hospitalised by security guards, who drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle bone. He helped to found The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country, including thirteen acres (five hectares) of prime real estate in Wandsworth on which owners Diageo intended to build a superstore. The protesters beat Diageo in court, built an "eco-village" and held on to the land for six months.

In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has also won the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize for his screenplay The Norwegian, a Sony Award for radio production, the Sir Peter Kent Award and the OneWorld National Press Award.

Initially, he was involved with the Respect political party, but he broke with that organisation when it chose to run candidates against the Green Party in the 2004 election to the European Parliament.

He is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine.

Monbiot's father, Raymond, is the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and Chairman of the National Convention. <ref>Raymond Monbiot CBE, People, Conservative Party website </ref> His mother Rosalie is another staunch Tory who led South Oxford district council for a decade. <ref> The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1996 </ref>

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Published Works

George Monbiot’s first book was Poisoned Arrows (1989), a work of investigative travel journalism criticising the treatment of the indigenous people of West Papua by the Indonesian government. It was followed by Amazon Watershed which explored the ecological and human costs of the timber industry in Brazil. His third book, No Man’s Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania, highlighted the struggles of nomadic people in Kenya and the United Republic of Tanzania.

In 2000, George Monbiot published Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. The book examines the role of coporate power within the United Kingdom, on both a local and national level, and argues that corporate involvement in politics is a serious threat to democracy. Subjects discussed in the book include the building of the Skye Bridge, corporate involvement in the National Health Service, the role of business in university research and the conditions which influence the granting of planning permission.

Monbiot’s most recent book, The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order, was published in 2003. The book is an attempt to set out a positive manifesto for change for the global justice movement. Monbiot critiques anarchism and Marxism, arguing that any possible solution to the world’s inequalities must be rooted in a democratic system. The four main changes to global governance which Monbiot argues for are a democratically elected world parliament which would pass resolutions on international issues; a democratised United Nations General Assembly to replace the unelected UN Security Council; an International Clearing Union which would automatically discharge trade deficits and prevent the accumulation of debt; and a Fair Trade Organisation which would regulate world trade in a way that protects the economies of poorer countries. The book also discusses ways in which these ideas may practically be achieved. Monbiot emphasises that he does not present the manifesto as a “final or definitive” answer to global inequalities but intends that it should open debate and that those who reject it must offer their own solutions. He argues that the global justice movement “must seek [ …] to provide a coherent programme of alternatives to the concentrated power of the dictatorship of vested interests.”

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Bibliography

Manifesto for a New World Order (2004, New Press) ISBN 1565849086
The Age of Consent (2003, Flamingo) ISBN 0007150423
Europe Inc.: Regional and Global Restructuring and the Rise of Corporate Power (2003, Pluto Press) foreward by George Monbiot, ISBN 0745321631
Anti-capitalism: A Guide to the Movement (2001, Bookmarks) ISBN 1898876789
Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000, Macmillan) ISBN 0333901649
No Man's Land: An Investigative Journey Through Kenya and Tanzania (1994, Picador) ISBN 0333601637
Amazon Watershed (1991, Abacus) ISBN 0718134281
Mahogany Is Murder: Mahogany Extraction from Indian Reserves in Brazil (1992) ISBN 1857501608
Poisoned Arrows: An Investigative Journey Through Indonesia (1989, Abacus) ISBN 0718131533