Home/Posts Tagged ‘Monbiot’
Posts Tagged ‘Monbiot’
Politics, Nov 29th, 2011,
The UK is bracing itself for the largest public sector strike in over 30 years, prompted by the frozen and cut wages of state employees. The Conservatives sell these cuts as ‘necessary austerities’, but many aren’t buying that. And in light of a constant rise in income inequality and unfair EU subsides towards the wealthy, it’s not hard to see why. Case in point: George Monbiot writes in the Guardian on the outrageous Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies, which take up 43% of the European budget (totalling £47bn per year). And the more land you own, the more money you…
Tags: Dominic, elite, European, farm, George, Lawson, Monbiot, nurses, private sector, public sector, strike, subsidies, teachers, UK, workers
Climate Change, Politics, Sep 21st, 2010,
Is environmental writer/Guardian columnist George Monbiot getting all doom and gloom Dark Mountain on us? Well, maybe not quite, but he’s taken a decisive step in that direction. In his recent piece for the Guardian, entitled ‘Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead’, Monbiot laments the undeniable failure of legislation, global cooperation and civil society to tackle the problem of climate change. One of the loudest voices for British environmentalism has given up on the political machine he has tried for years to influence. Because it isn’t working. Anywhere. In fact things are just getting…
Tags: Climate change, Dark Mountain, failure, global, legislation, Monbiot, warming
Climate Change, Green living, Sep 8th, 2010,
Environmental writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot knows a lot more about environmental issues than I do. But his latest article, ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’, seems too much of a flip-flop: from advocating one ‘extreme’ lifestyle to going a bit close to absolving meat eating’s environmental damage, because theoretically, the livestock industry could be a lot more sustainable. It is admirable for a public intellectual to admit he was wrong and Monbiot’s article makes good points, gleaned from Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. But the issue was never…
Tags: environmental, farm, George, industry, livestock, meat, Monbiot, vegan, veganism
Science & Technology, Weird Stuff, Aug 18th, 2010,
In Monday’s Guardian George Monbiot slams the concept of ‘vertical farming’ in a piece, entitled ‘Greens living in ivory towers now want to farm them too’. His main beef is that a Columbia University parasitologist named Dickson Despommier has been getting a lot of support in the green media for his idea to create skyscraper farms in densely populated urban areas like New York City, which might be a brilliant idea, but it’s a fanciful one as well. This immediately reminded me of stories about an underground indoor rice farm in Tokyo’s financial district, which turned out to be an…
Tags: crazy, crops, Despommier, Detroit, expensive, farm, farming, food, gardens, Manhattan, Monbiot, urban, vertical
Green living, Politics, Jun 25th, 2010,
UNCIVILISATION – aka the Dark Mountain Festival – took place over the last weekend in May at Llangollen, a small town in northwest Wales on the edge of the Berwyn Mountains. I’ve written a couple of times about the polemical Dark Mountain Project, a post-environmentalist movement that has given up on mainstream environmentalism, activism and politics – but not life, as I’ve been assured by DM founder Paul Kingsnorth – in favor of establishing a new movement and new way of life in the ‘age of decline’, which does not depend on current established economical/political/cultural models. I did not attend…
Tags: Dark Mountain, environmental, environmentalism, festival, George, Kingsnorth, Monbiot, movement, Paul, project, uncivilisation
Climate Change, Politics, May 12th, 2010,
A few days ago I wrote a bit about the Dark Mountain Project, a sort of post-environmentalist survivalist ideology with a lot of poetry thrown in. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand DM seem appealingly realist and anti-system. Yet at the same time it’s a prematurely pessimistic ‘the worst case scenario has already arrived’ kind of philosophy. The thing is, for the overwhelming majority of environmentalists, greens, etc. the fight is far from over. George Monbiot – who will be attending Uncivilization: the Dark Mountain Festival at the end of the month – clearly hasn’t given…
Tags: Dark Mountain, dystopia, environmentalist, George, hexayurt, Monbiot, project
Climate Change, Politics, Mar 12th, 2010,
Poor George Monbiot. Is screaming at a wall finally taking its toll? In a entitled ‘The trouble with trusting complex science’ in Monday’s Guardian, Monbiot bemoans the illogical and tribalist political opinions associated with the climate debate. He aptly uses the words of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Yet so many, whether ‘denier’ or ‘warmist’, seem to think they know it all. Or, rather (let’s face it) those who accept man made climate change trust the scientific community and those who are climate skeptics don’t. And this seems to be determined…
Tags: change, climate, Monbiot, science, scientist, skeptic, sorcerer
Green living, Politics, Science & Technology, Mar 3rd, 2010,
Several recent articles in the British and international media have dealt with the question of solar power and government schemes that encourage homeowners to install solar panels. One such plan, announced yesterday by UK energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband is a Pay As You Save program that provides ‘green loans’ to those who install energy saving eco-measures. The loans are purported to cover installation and purchase costs while money saved in energy bills is meant to outweigh the repayment of said loans. Miliband is quoted in an article from the Press Association: The Warm Homes, Greener Homes strategy…
Tags: emissions, energy, geothermal, government, Green, Monbiot, panels, photovoltaic, power, scheme, Solar, UK
