EP.222 - GEORGE MONBIOT

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey, how you doing podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here and I'm reporting to you

from a field in Norfolk County and I'm yomping through a dewy field with my best dog friend in the whole world, which is Rosie Buxton.

How are you doing, Rosie?

Not too excited about being on this walk in the wet grass, actually.

Oh dear.

Well, we need some exercise, so

it's nice to be out.

Plus, it's not too windy, as it has been the last few times when we've come out to record these intros.

Today it's nice and still.

And these are the sounds of rural Norfolk

on a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of March 2024.

A bit of sport being played over there in the distance.

Oh, some clapping.

Good sport has happened.

Beautiful birds enjoying the

marshy conditions around this part.

We've had quite a bit of rain this week

and it's brought the river levels right up.

The water hasn't drained away yet.

And the birds dig it.

How's things with you though, podcats?

Not too bad, I hope.

Look up there, Rosie.

There's a big giant bird just sat there.

What is that?

Is that one of those Egyptian geese?

Quite warm now.

Right, focus.

Let me tell you a little bit about podcast number 222, which features a literally rambling conversation with the British writer, journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot.

Monbiot facts, George was born in 1963 and grew up in Oxfordshire, later studying zoology at the Oxford University.

In his 20s after leaving Oxford he began a career in investigative journalism.

covering topics from politics and economics to environmental science and conservation.

His first book, Poisoned Arrows, about human rights issues in West Papua, was published in 1989.

And since then, in addition to his journalism and public speaking, George has written, by my count, another 11 books.

Those have included Captive State, The Corporate Takeover of Britain, published in 2000.

in which George considered the influence of corporate power on democracy.

His book Feral was published in 2013.

That was a plea to bring wonder back into our lives by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea.

George is the founder of The Land Is Ours, a campaign for the right of access to the countryside and its resources in the United Kingdom.

In 2016, in his regular column for the Guardian newspaper, George wrote movingly on the subject of loneliness.

It was a piece that led to him collaborating with Scottish folk musician Ewan MacLennan on an album featuring songs and spoken word passages called Breaking the Spell of Loneliness.

The project, which also included a book, aimed to explore the themes of social isolation, community and connection in modern society.

In his 2022 book, Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, George considered the environmental impact of agriculture and proposed sustainable alternatives.

This is just a tiny selection from George's career thus far, you understand.

He has just finished writing a new book, Invisible Doctrine, The Secret History of Neoliberalism.

And he wrote that with filmmaker Peter Hutchinson.

It's due for publication in May of this year, 2024.

And in it, he and Peter, I am now quoting from the blurb, show how a fringe philosophy in the 1930s, championing competition as the defining feature of humankind, was systematically hijacked by a group of wealthy elites determined to guard their fortunes and power.

Think tanks, corporations, the media, university departments, and politicians were all deployed to promote the idea that people are consumers rather than citizens.

There's a link in the description so that you can do your duty as consumers and pre-order the book.

My conversation with George was recorded towards the end of April last year, 2023, in Bristol, not far from where George now lives with his partner in South Devon.

And rather than sit in a room, we went wandering on a rather overcast day through the parks and woodland on the edge of Bristol, overlooking the River Avon, with me doing my best to catch what George was saying on my dictaphone, the one that I am using now, which I think I mainly did.

Which I think I mainly did.

We talked about some of the themes in George's book, Regenesis, including the aspects of farming that George considers such a threat to the health of the planet.

But I also asked George about his own life and what he does for a good time, the secrets of cider-making, why he wasn't more excited about the coronation of King Charles, which at that point was just over a week away.

And we talked about our very starkly contrasting experiences of being sent away to boarding school at a young age.

I also asked George how he came to believe in the benefits of nuclear power, and I asked him about some of the things that give him hope despite the many problems the planet faces.

But we began our ramble in the park at the top of Bristol, where George introduced me to a selection of tiny soil dwellers in a random clump of earth.

Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now, with George Mumbio.

Here we

La

la

Maybe you could set the scene for us, George.

So we're on Clifton Downs, which is the park at the top of Bristol.

I mean, the physical top of Bristol, it's like almost the highest point.

And one edge of it looks down over the Avon Gorge, so we might go there.

The other edge touches the top of the city at this very grand part of the city called Clifton.

I used to live in Bristol a long time ago.

The only proper job I ever had was a producer at the BBC's Natural History Unit based here.

Right.

And so I used to come up here and run around, do a little exercise, watch the birds, often see sparrow hawks and stuff.

Yeah.

So it's a bit of an old stamping ground.

Yeah, well it's nice to be in Bristol.

It's always nice to come to beautiful Bristol.

Yeah.

With its broad-minded attitudes and its lovely hills and views.

Okay, so where should we go first?

Well, I thought we could maybe do a couple of things.

We could head towards the woods on the edge of the gorge and have a look down over the gorge, which is quite spectacular.

Yeah.

But also, I've brought a trowel along and a little hand lens, and I thought we might look for little beasts in the soil.

Okay.

Which is one of my favorite.

Which is how your book starts.

Yeah.

Regenesis.

Yeah.

With you doing exactly that.

Yeah.

And communing with the nematodes.

That's right.

It was a revelation.

You know, I've been all over the world looking at ecosystems, looking at beasts, you know, in rainforests and deserts and the sea and the tundra and everywhere.

But I suddenly realised at the age of 50 something that perhaps the most interesting ecosystem of all was the one I was standing on.

And I'd never explored it.

And as soon as I did,

it was like this whole world opening up.

of which I'd previously been unaware.

And was there a specific incident that triggered that realization or that interest?

I mean the thing which really did it for me was lockdown because I couldn't go anywhere, couldn't go and explore all the lovely places I like to visit and so I thought you know where can I go?

The only way I can go is down.

The only way is down and actually it was a great place to go and so you know while I was sort of inwardly moaning about not being able to go any further actually I was having these amazing adventures.

And at the time we were living in Oxford and I had a little allotment orchard where we grew like heritage apples and cherries and pears and stuff.

And so I started digging in that, just little holes and going in with a hand lens.

And well, hopefully we'll see for ourselves, but it's just like suddenly you realise that this thing you've taken for granted that is literally beneath us

is as rich and abundant as a rainforest or a coral reef.

In fact, soil is a bit like a coral reef in that it's a biological structure.

It's created by the creatures that live in it.

If it weren't for those creatures, there would be no soil.

And it turns out to be a phenomenally complex biological structure which we have scarcely begun to understand.

And yet,

this ecosystem that we know almost nothing about produces 99% of our calories.

We are totally dependent on it, and yet we're blundering around in total ignorance.

Let's move over and let's find somewhere to start digging.

I think this could be quite good because you want a bit which hasn't been trampled.

Now, look, I can't guarantee what we find because it can be very variable.

But what we got here is a bit of sward

which isn't compacted.

So that's a good start.

And it's under permanent grass, so that's another good start because it's not all smashed up.

And so

it's going to be a great sward.

And we're going to dig a very small hole.

If any of the park wardens are listening, it's going to be just a speck.

I don't believe that that's the worst that's happened up here in this palm of Bristol.

I'm very surprised.

Alright, so I've got a trowel.

Not to sound obsessed by sward, but like is the lawn behind us is that sward?

I don't know if you'd call that sward.

I think it's a little bit more.

There has to be some length in it.

I think there has to be some length.

Oh, this is you see, I would call it tufty.

Yeah.

So George has just stuck his trowel into the sward and he has dug out a nice, I think the official technical term is lump

of very,

would you say, peaty soil?

I would say it's it's clay sandy.

You can see it's sort of got this slight reddishness.

And it's got some worms sticking out of it, instant worms.

But it's the things you can't see with the naked eye.

It's very often most exciting.

It is, it is chocolatey.

That is a good way of putting it.

Wait a minute.

Let's get the light on this.

It's sort of like, well, have a smell.

Sort of like pudding.

That is very soily.

Oh, look, and this is a leather jacket, which is the larva of a crane fly.

Oh look, there's a tawny minor bee, which must have been digging its hole in there.

It's now walking over my finger.

Sorry to have disturbed you.

Does it have stinging capacity?

It does, yes.

But you're just very confidently

see you as its enemy.

We're basically just seeing you as a plant.

So that must have been burrowing.

into the soil and I'm sorry to have disturbed you.

Wow that is crazy that you dug that up and there's it's like you pre-planned how busy it was going to be.

Well, it's it's it is nuts, it's like the whole cast of some Pixar movie

on there, yes.

And that's just what you can see with the naked eye.

Now, where it gets really interesting is stuff.

There's a little white slug here,

I'm seeing a tiny little pot worm, stoned worm, entrance.

Oh, this centipede's cool let me um right

and now George is plopping a centipede on here and this is a tiny white one isn't it oh yeah

hello mate

yeah it's very very tiny it's like a I mean the actual body itself is only slightly thicker than a coarse hair yeah

And so the tiny little legs on there are just unimaginably thin.

But I mean that is your medieval white worm isn't it?

I mean if that thing were coming at you and it were 20 foot long, it'd be sad.

What I'm really looking for are these amazing little crawling creatures like springtails and mites and bristletails which are quite magic.

They've got so many different shapes and sizes and colours.

I mean when you've got the right conditions, you know, right place, right time of year, when it's warm, in a couple of hours doing this, you can see more of the major branches of life than you would on a two-week safari in the Serengeti.

Because

you've just got this astonishing abundance and diversity.

And what do you mean by the branches of life?

So the big, what we call the big taxonomic groups, the the orders, the classes, the phyla.

So, for instance, you and me belong to Phylum Cordata,

which is all animals with backbones and quite a few with sort of semi-backbones.

It's a vast phylum, which it's got the mammals, it's got the birds, it's got the reptiles, the amphibians, the fish, the hemichordates, sea squirts, the lancelets, lampreys, all sorts of weird things in it.

And then we're in a class, which is a smaller group of that called mammalia, and then you go down and down from there.

And most of them, you know, are unknown, even to someone like me with a zoology degree.

Right.

And you make the point in the book fairly early on, I think, that there is, am I right in saying no institute for soil ecology?

There's no global treaty on soil for a start.

I mean there's treaties on all sorts of things, there's nothing on soil.

There is no global soil ecology institute and there's no whole undergraduate degree that you can do on soil in this country.

I mean it's just...

In other words, an incredibly low level of expertise for something so fundamental.

It's neglect on a massive scale.

And it's, I think, typical of the way we operate.

You know, we talk about having blind spots, but we don't have blind spots.

We have tiny spots of light, few things that we concentrate on, and we miss everything else that surrounds it.

And, I mean, soil breakdown is probably as big an issue as climate breakdown, yet we scarcely talk about it at all.

And so we have this relentless focus on things, some of which are important, some of which are completely unimportant, and we miss the bigger picture.

over and over again.

Generally, especially in the media in which we both work, what is important is not salient and what is salient is not important.

But do you characterise that as being malicious?

No, I mean I think most of it is out of ignorance.

I mean we're all phenomenally ignorant.

And so as far as your interest in soil goes in Regenesis, your book, that leads you to talking about farming a great deal.

So you know we could have this entirely innocent conversation about potworms and dipleurans and centipedes and bees and you say well isn't that sweet but actually

if you have a political sense of the predicament we're in you can't help but take that forward into saying

and therefore unless things change radically we are totally fucked and we've got to stop that from happening and that means confrontation that means you inevitably run up against vested interests.

You can't help it.

And I'm not saying these interests are evil or they're trying to push us towards destruction.

They're not.

That's not the agenda at all.

They're just trying to carry on making money in the way that they make money or pursue cultural interests or whatever it might be that currently might seem to people in that position to be the only way in which they could possibly live.

And someone like me comes along and saying, actually, this way in which you are innocently living is pushing us towards the precipice at great speed.

And it was partly through

my interest in soil, but actually through my interest in all other Earth systems, that I came to this horrifying realization that the worst thing we've ever done to the planet is farming.

And that doesn't win you many friends.

No, I mean, it's my expertise in your field is minimal.

But just the most cursory amount of digging

into

your writing and the conversations that you have immediately brings me up against your critics and people who are upset by what you have to say.

And the most obvious of those, as far as regenesis goes, are the farmers, who traditionally they're the salt of the earth, literally.

They're individuals who are honest, hard-working folk.

And how do you characterize some of the criticisms that you've received?

What are the typical things that you're being accused of?

People say you're trying to destroy our industry, you're undermining hundreds of years of hard work, you're attacking my culture.

And yeah, I completely get all that.

I understand where people are coming from.

You know, and farmers aren't very used to criticism for the reasons that you say.

You know, they're revered in our society.

And of course, we are totally dependent on farming for our survival.

And I'm not saying we should do away with all farming because we would immediately starve, obviously.

I am saying actually that there are major portions of food production we can take out of farming altogether and we would benefit enormously if we did that.

But

people get very threatened, understandably.

Yeah.

So to be clear, what is it that you are proposing in Regenesis?

Broadly speaking, more food with less farming.

And by less farming, I mean less impact.

I also mean less land use.

And that is the crucial aspect, another of these massive things we overlook.

So as environmentalists, we go on about

climate breakdown, about river pollution, about plastic.

There are a few issues that obsess us, but the biggest one of all, and perhaps the most obvious one, is one we scarcely talk about, which is the amount of land we use.

That is the crucial environmental resource.

And every hectare you use for extractive industries is a hectare that can't be occupied by wild ecosystems.

Yet the great majority of the world's species and earth systems themselves depend for their survival on wild ecosystems.

And we sometimes talk about land when it comes to cities.

We talk about urban sprawl.

And we're right to get angry about urban sprawl.

It's bad for cities, it's bad for the countryside.

We should try to keep cities compact.

But the total global area of cities, in fact, all the built environment, all our homes, all our businesses, all our infrastructure, is 1% of the planet's land surface.

Farming occupies 38% of the planet's land surface.

And the great majority of that is very low production.

So it's agricultural sprawl.

It's occupying large areas of land while producing very little.

And that has a huge opportunity cost, a huge ecological opportunity cost, which is the cost of the ecosystems that aren't there because that land is occupied by farming, and the carbon opportunity cost, because invariably those ecosystems are richer in carbon than the farming systems that have replaced them.

Now, we can break this down still further.

38% of the land's surface used by farming, and you think of farming as being crops, right?

But only 12% of the land is covered by crops.

And only roughly half of that land is producing crops directly eaten by humans.

The rest is crops eaten by livestock.

So only about six, seven percent of the land surface is producing crops directly consumed by people.

What about that 26%?

All that is grazing land.

That's all land where primarily cattle and sheep are grazing.

Now all the food is, and the celebrity chefs and the food writers and people are saying, oh, we should eat pasture-fed meat.

Pasture-fed meat is great.

Yeah, well, it seems superficially like a better life for the animals.

Yeah, and it probably is, marginally.

I mean, it's not great, but it is certainly better than being crammed into a massive steel factory.

Like, almost all our meat and animal products come from massive steel factories.

We totally deceive ourselves about what we're eating where we're at.

Yeah,

do you know what the sort of percentage is?

It's around 90%.

All of animal products are factory-fed.

And those are the sort of horrific images of the animals in the worst kind of conditions.

Yeah, and we're in total denial about it.

You know so in the US for instance where 95% of people eat meat there was a survey which showed that 47% of people wanted to ban slaughterhouses.

Yeah yeah.

You know we're in a state of cognitive dissonance.

We don't want to go there.

We don't want to explore how we're really eating and where it comes from.

But there's a small proportion of our diet which comes from pasture-fed animals.

Some of our milk, some of our meat comes from pasture-fed animals.

Is that the same as free range?

Yeah, it is when it comes to cattle and sheep.

When it comes to chickens, free range is actually just you know there's a small muddy yard and most of the time they're spending indoors in most cases but anyway but yeah free range beef and lamb that we're talking about pasture fed primarily and people say well that's what we should eat instead because look you can see it's much nicer and you can aesthetically it's much more pleasing it's probably slightly kinder to the animals environmentally it's an absolute catastrophe it's the worst thing you can possibly do.

There was a study in the United States looking at what would happen if people did as the food is tell us to do, which is to switch from corn-fed beef, which is a nightmare in its own right, to pasture-fed beef.

And it found you'd have to expand the area used for cattle 270%.

You'd have to cut down all the forests, drain all the wetlands, de-gazette all the national parks, demolish all the cities, and you'd still be importing a lot of your beef from Brazil.

There's just not enough planet to do it.

You know, the only reason some people can eat pasture-fed meat is that other people aren't.

Yeah, and it's disastrous why, because the impression that most people have, that someone like me has, is that it's a kind of self-regulating system and that the animals grazing on that land is part of the cycle of what regenerates the countryside.

This is the story we're told, and people say, well, we're mimicking the ecosystem, but it's a very thin caricature of a wild ecosystem.

So the first question you'd ask when you come to an ecosystem is, where are the large predators?

Predators are slaughtered around the world at the behest of livestock farming.

The next thing you'd ask is in a formerly forested landscape where are the trees?

And of course in your average livestock landscape there might be no trees at all.

I mean if you go to the uplands of Britain they are almost entirely treeless and that's not because that is their natural state.

It's because of grazing mostly by sheep and sheep they love tree seedlings and they're highly nutritious and so they seek them out.

So you'd have to bring down your sheep numbers to about five per square kilometre until trees started to come back.

And already sheep farming is completely uneconomic, even at current densities.

And so, I mean, you might as well just not have them at all, which would be the better option.

And so what you've got in grazing livestock is a fully automated system for ecological destruction.

And they also produce a lot of methane.

These ruminant animals are the biggest source of human generated methane.

And methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.

And partly, primarily because of that, that, the livestock industry is estimated to produce more greenhouse gases than all global transport.

Really?

Even if you shut down all other sources of greenhouse gases everywhere on Earth, the food industry alone, primarily because of livestock, would overshoot the 1.5 degrees target by two or three times by the end of the century.

So in the chart, because the chart is constantly surprising, what is producing the most amount of harmful emissions?

The fashion industry is way up there.

Yeah, yeah.

The kind of fast fashion industry.

What is number one producer of...

Well, it's fossil fuels.

It's fossil fuels.

Right, still.

But, you know, if you look at the total impacts of livestock farming, because it affects just about every ecosystem.

You know, it's the shit going down the rivers, which is now in many parts of the world the major source of river pollution.

You know, here in this country, we're obsessed by sewage, as we ought to be.

It's disgusting what the water companies are doing.

But actually, it's only the second biggest source of river pollution.

The biggest source is agriculture, mostly driven by the livestock industry.

And it's the chicken farms, it's the dairy farms, it's the pig farms, just producing too much poo.

And it either goes directly into the river or indirectly it's washed off the land into the river.

You get what's called eutrophication, over nutrition of the river.

You get algal blooms, they kill off everything else and you get a dead river.

And that's happening all over the country, some of our best rivers.

But then you've also got dead zones forming at sea, partly because of the volume of livestock manure.

You've got the huge areas of land being turned over to crops to be grown for livestock.

But over and above everything else, you've got the land used for grazing livestock, which is all land which could otherwise support wild ecosystems.

And that land occupies twice as much space.

as all the other land that humans are primarily using.

And we ought to be all over that like a rash as environmentalists but we're not we hold back we're afraid to touch it we're afraid to go there because there's a kind of moral force field around farming we don't judge it by the same standards

compared to other industries right because people presumably think

well people need to eat yeah and we do you know this is why it's not an attempt to get rid of farming but radically to change it so that we can continue to eat right yeah because that is one of the fundamental problems we We are destroying the basis of our subsistence.

If you start with soil, where it all comes from, we are ripping through soil at phenomenal rates.

Soil degradation rates mean that future food production will be made impossible unless we change things very quickly and drastically.

But when you look at all the aggregate impacts of the livestock industry,

it seems to me as urgent to stop farming animals as it is to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

And I completely understand why that's a highly unpopular message.

In fact, when we first started talking about leaving fossil fuels in the ground, that was also a highly unpopular message.

Of course, and it still is very controversial in many parts of the world where there's communities that rely on

the coal miners, the oil workers, they hate you for it.

And fair enough, you know,

again, I understand that.

The difference in this case is far fewer people are calling for an end to livestock farming.

And so those few of us who are are much much more exposed.

Yeah, yeah.

And also

people say, why is he going after the farmers?

This situation really is enabled by big farm or whatever the corporate term is.

Big farmer is.

You can call it big farm.

Big farmer is

that makes it a bit more confusing.

Well, I mean, there are no clear lines here.

You know, a farmer just the other day was fined for destroying the banks of the River Lug.

And I saw him defended on social media as saying, oh, this farmer was only trying to protect his livelihood.

You know, he's struggling to survive like anyone else.

Well, after the prosecution, the reports came out in the papers that his assets are valued at between 21 and 23 million pounds.

Yeah, this is your horny-handed son of toil.

He's probably an outlier, though, yes?

Well, I mean, when it comes to capital wealth, a lot of farmers are very, very rich indeed.

Income, not so much.

You know, we're talking about a fundamental difference there, but most of that income for livestock farmers in this country, certainly for livestock farmers whose animals graze outside, is coming from public subsidies.

You and I are paying for it.

Now, there's a fundamental principle of public money that it should buy public goods, not public harm.

And by subsidising livestock farming, and the majority of farm subsidies go into livestock farming, we're actually subsidizing public harm.

It's like subsidising coal or oil.

And we shouldn't be doing that.

I'm perfectly happy for us to continue paying farmers, but pay them for something entirely different.

Pay them to restore ecosystems rather than continue to trash them.

Hey, George, shall we change location?

Yeah, let's go to the gorge.

We've been lucky with the weather so far.

It's kind of overcast out here, but it's not raining, which is good.

A whole flock of jackdaws come down and they're feeding over the field.

A couple of kerring crows as well, a magpie.

What are those guys munching?

Well, we found that leather jacket, didn't we?

That crane fly larva in the soil.

They're probably looking for them, I would guess, more than anything, because they're big and juicy and they live close to the surface of the soil.

So they might be listening out to see if they can hear the leather jackets moving and then pumps.

Right.

Leather jackets don't sound nice to eat.

They just make me think of Danny Zucco.

Hey, while we're walking, let's talk trivia before we go all heavy again.

I had some trivial questions that I wanted to ask you.

Well, when I was talking to Tom Hanks the other day, one surprises me, as one says,

me and Tom chatting.

One thing that did animate him was the question, what is your favorite drink?

Do you drink alcohol?

Yeah, yeah.

So, I sometimes get accused of being a champagne socialist.

I'm at pains to point out that I'm actually a cider environmentalist.

When we had the orchard in Oxford, we used to make our own cider.

And

actually, to be honest, the making was more pleasurable than the drinking most of the time.

Some of it was good, some of it was really good, but some of it was like, oh, God,

is it fizzy that's to remove graffiti?

Yeah, yeah, well, it depends on the type.

So proper cider

cider

has

nothing in it except the juice of the apples you've squeezed.

You mash up the apples, stick them in a press, squeeze out the juice and then you just leave it in bottles or barrels with the top slightly unscrewed so that it doesn't explode when it ferments.

And you'll press it in October and by Christmas you can start drinking it.

It's still pretty sweet then.

It's very fizzy at that point.

It's a nice drink, you know, on the whole.

whole by February I'd say it's about perfect it's got a really nice balance not too sweet not too dry still a bit of fizz in it

and you can drink it up to about the beginning of June by July it's paint stripper yeah it's so harsh all the sugar's gone it's turned to alcohol it gets very sharp and acidic and you just got

it freezes your mouth.

Do you drink it cold or do you drink it at a sort of room temperature?

Oh room temperature, a proper

English purist.

I think I've got quite an unsophisticated palate.

I'm childish, George.

I like fizzy pop.

I like it cold.

You know, if I'm ordering at a pub, I'll just say, what's your weakest, fizziest lager?

And all the kind of ale guys look at me with contempt.

He's not one of us.

No, I'm terrible.

And what's your idea of a...

This is the kind of question that my character in Hot Fuzz would have asked.

I was an annoying local reporter in the film Hot Fuzz,

and one of my questions was: What's your idea of the perfect Sunday morning?

I'm not going to ask you that specific one, but

what do you do for a sort of indulgent night in?

Well, I'm a day creature, to be honest.

I get up very early, sometimes sort of four o'clock, um, often five.

Whoa, what time are you going to bed then?

Like six?

Yeah, it's a bit pathetic, but I'm definitely in bed.

Pathetic is impressive.

I'm definitely in bed by ten.

Um, and so everything I love doing is basically diurnal.

So sea kayaking is top on my list.

And I love being just out on my boat as far from the shore as I can get.

Is this a solo kayaking expedition you're making?

Yeah, the whole point of it from my point of view is to be by myself, as far away from everyone as possible.

Okay, so it's a sort of meditative exercise.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're not listening to Spotify top 40 playlist?

Not even to your podcast, I'm afraid to say.

That's perfect for kayaking.

Yeah.

So if it's really cold and it's raining, you're not going to go out now, are you?

If it's been a long time and the conditions haven't been right, I'll go out when it's a bit iffy.

You're still going to get pleasure in a kayak with rain coming at you like needles.

Yeah, well...

You're like a hair shirt guy.

You'd be whipping yourself, wouldn't you?

Yeah, so I would have been a religious fanatic at a previous age.

Yeah, do you reckon?

Yeah.

Now, listeners, we are navigating our way down quite a steep area of wood, fairly slippery.

I'm aware that I'm not using any of the right terminology for what we're walking across.

Give us the jargon for what we're seeing.

Steep and slippery is pretty close to the correct jargon, I'd say.

I hope you don't mind me leading you down this tangled route.

No, this is good.

This is exciting.

Might not be the best part.

Okay, we're

okay with that.

Yep.

You can tell we're in deep because there's no toilet paper

and there's no contours here

or crisp packets.

You know what I mean?

Oh no, hang on, I have found a vodka bottle.

Small bottle of Glenn's vodka.

Glenn's vodka.

Lovely.

Wow, Glenn, he was really committed to it.

He just...

Yeah, he came along.

Oh, either that or he chucked the bottle.

Right.

It rolled down the hill.

This is the point at which I tell you I haven't a clue where I'm going.

Where I'm trying to take you is to the edge of the Avon Gorge.

I think that is over there somewhere.

But we're just sort of working our way downwards.

Yeah.

I do see

something.

Yeah, there's something there, isn't there?

What is that, the road or the river?

Well, there is a road, but there might be a river beneath it.

Let's carry on and see what we can.

Because

somewhere along there, you see that light, that could be the gorge.

It's looking more civilized here.

I can see a fridge container, F-R-I-J.

And there's the condom packet.

There we go.

I mean it is a beautiful spot for some drunken love making.

We can do that later.

This is something pretty amazing about British cities.

You don't generally have to go very far and you're in quite a wild place.

Here we go, here we go.

Okay, right, this is the Avon Gorge.

So we're looking down the tidal stretch of the River Avon.

It's at low tide, tide, it's pretty muddy.

You can see further along the cliffs hanging over it, there's a road going alongside it.

Sorry about that trek.

No, that was fun.

I haven't done that on the podcast.

There's an incredibly wide range of trees.

This is a horn beam.

We don't see many of those these days.

There's an oak there, there's a beech there, there's ash, there's privet in the understory, there's yew, there's holly and all this, hazelware, all this is right on the edge of Bristol.

Yes.

Quite rich, rich bit of woodland.

Yeah, there you go.

Doesn't surprise me in the least.

Bristol's a wonderfully diverse place.

It's a great place.

Shall we carry on up this bit?

Yeah.

Okay.

There's the new graffiti.

No king love here.

Someone has painted in large white letters, capital letters, on a rock.

over the way from us.

Quite a daring bit, it was on a major cliff face.

No king love here.

No king love here.

You've really got to be a public love.

Not have any king love to go out.

I'm not going to be a Republican to go to that length.

What are you going to be doing on the coronation day?

Hopefully, I'll be streaming.

Two miles offshore.

Okay.

That would be the ideal.

In your kayak.

Yeah.

You know, I haven't got anything against...

the royal family.

I just can't stand the fuss.

I can't stand the media.

That's what gets me.

It's this ridiculous obsession with a few folk who

are probably not that different to the rest of us.

Certainly got no particular skills, abilities, talents that other people don't have.

It's just it's madness.

I just don't get it.

It's one of those moments when

I feel I don't understand this country.

My mum loved all that and I think for her,

you know, it was just the

sense of continuity

and tradition

and

a sense of being connected to the good aspects of the imperial past.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like,

because there are some, right?

Are there?

Are there?

Tea on the lawn, George.

Cricket, fair play.

Well, your

upbringing intrigues me because you're one of those people.

I mean, you are in, I think, every conceivable way a more sort of radical figure than I am.

But your parents were conservative.

I mean, it tends to be that you've got all sorts of different ways of being influenced by your parents.

Either it can be a total negative influence and you move away from them as much as you possibly can, to find yourself in opposition to them.

Or if you admire them, you kind of adopt their views, especially politically, you'll grow up seeing the world in a broadly similar way.

And if you become

more radical than them, it's usually kind of further to further along the same spectrum.

Yeah.

With me, my parents were conservative, but you know, they were nice to me.

Yeah, yeah.

I loved them, they loved me.

When I became a little more politically aware, I realized that I didn't agree with them about politics.

But we were never so political that it would totally destroy our relationship.

And so that's left me with a kind of residual, some residual aspects of kind of conservative sympathies, or at least a feeling that not all conservatives and Tories are fundamentally evil.

But that, as I say, is a product of my fortunate, comfortable and non-horrific family life.

What was the situation for you?

Not so good.

So, I mean, my mum never wanted children, she was very clear about that.

And actually, she would have been really happy if she'd been allowed to go off and become an academic.

That's what I think would have suited her very well.

Not having children, burying herself in absorbing work.

She went off to, she sort of left home and went to a US university but she was called back, she was commanded to return by her father when he was standing as a Conservative Party candidate and he said he needed to be surrounded by his family otherwise it would look strange if one of his daughters wasn't there.

It was terrible and so

She came back, she abandoned what I think could have been a great academic career because she was very intelligent, extremely hard-working, had a sort of roving intelligence which I think could have taken her a long way.

She had that bench.

Yeah, and soon afterwards her wings were clipped again and again and then eventually she sort of gave up and got married and

had children because as she explained it people would have thought it was strange if she didn't.

You say as she explained it was that a conversation that you had with her specifically?

She had these moments of extraordinary almost brutal frankness.

I mean a lot of the time things were buried, covered up, but there were these almost fugue states where she would say it exactly like it was.

And

that was one of those moments.

But when she said that to you, was she mindful of how you would feel when she said that?

Or was that part of her fugue state was just not to be aware?

Yeah, I think she always struggled to be aware of how other people saw it.

And I don't blame her for any of this.

It's just,

you know, she didn't have those capacities.

And my dad was always away.

He worked incredibly hard, even at weekends.

He'd often come back very angry.

It was a further difficulty and basically they couldn't wait to get rid of us.

And so they did.

And I was sent to boarding school when I was eight.

And it was horrendous.

Just...

So it's you and how many siblings?

I had two siblings,

two sisters, but the middle sibling, Catherine, died when she was 30 of anorexia that had begun when she was a teenager and really in I mean it seems quite clear to me that it was in response to the

really horrible situation the way she was torn between an utterly brutal school which made mine look quite mild and a very difficult home life.

So you were all at boarding school?

Yes.

Yeah.

And as quickly, as soon as we could be,

we were sent off.

Eight, I mean that's hard.

I was nine

when I got sent off.

I got sent, though, to

kind of a cozy, woolly place, co-ed, no uniform, out in Sussex.

But your experience

sounded in every way worse than mine.

I think the fundamental mistake that the school made was that because you get physically tough by being exposed to physical hardship, which is true,

it makes you emotionally tough to be exposed to emotional hardship, which is fundamentally untrue.

It is a massive mistake that was made repeatedly again and again, you know, in the 19th and 20th centuries, where people believe you treat them mean and they'll grow out tough.

And it's just not true.

You create weaknesses that way.

You create what's been described by the psychologist Joyce Schaverian as boarding school syndrome, which is very similar to what people who've been put into care experience, and it leaves sort of lasting emotional scars, major emotional damage.

And you spend your life dealing with that, you know.

And there are positive ways of dealing with it through love and therapy, and there are negative ways of dealing with it through alcohol and drugs and abuse and all the rest of it.

So, having been through that extremely brutal and harsh system, a system without any love, any care, where the teachers were completely indifferent.

It was worse at my sister's school where the teachers joined in and regarded all the hardships you might face as character forming.

You have a choice.

Are you going to respond to this in a negative and self-destructive way, in a way that destroys all those around you as well?

or are you going to try to deal with it in ways which I hesitate to say are positive, but at least are non-damaging and can be healing.

Richard Beard wrote a book, Sad Little Men, about all this.

And I heard him talking about it and describing

the shell that you adopt to protect yourself from some of the wounds and the vulnerability that you feel after having been through that experience.

And he says typical of that is to overdevelop charm and self-deprecation and things like that.

And sort of basically end up like Hugh Grant, he said.

And I sort of thought, okay, that does resonate.

And it made me uncomfortable because I've always been sort of self-deprecating.

And I remember me and Joe when we used to do our TV show, a big motif was putting ourselves down in all sorts of ways in order to anticipate it coming from someone else.

It was better coming from us.

Yes,

yeah, exactly.

And I sort of, after a while, began to see that as not necessarily a great thing to do.

And it was pointed out to me sometimes by other people, like, you shouldn't put yourself down like that.

You know, it's not doing anyone any favours.

But I've now reached a place where I'm still, you know, I don't see those qualities as inherently negative.

Like everything in moderation, right?

It's nice.

Charming people are charming and nice.

And sometimes it's nice to be charming.

And it's nice to be polite.

I understand that sometimes politeness can be more insidious and more of a cover for something, for some other kind of agenda.

But it's not always that way, right?

no no it's not um but you know I think as someone who might exhibit those symptoms you've got to understand what they are and what you're doing yeah and if it's charm and the charm goes deep it's not just an entirely superficial shield that you're putting up then fine yeah yeah there's there's no harm in that but you know think of Boris Johnson he was very charming but there was all sorts of really nasty stuff under that surface and a lot of what I perceive because I came through a similar system as extreme damage which just hasn't been dealt with.

And the charm, as I see it there, was very superficial indeed.

You know, underneath that, he was utterly ruthless and would chuck anyone under a bus to get what he wanted.

I guess the other thing that occurred to me when I was listening to Richard Beard talking was,

and again, I have to stress that, you know, I lucked out.

I was able to have some good times.

I met some people I love very much and care about at the schools I went to.

And

I

almost certainly got kind of unearned advantages which I have benefited from.

So to that extent my parents were right.

They did give me a leg up.

That's a whole other conversation of whether I deserved it and what the effect of that leg up is on society as a whole.

But the idea that all these terrible things happen at boarding school

seems somehow to suggest that terrible things don't happen at other schools.

But of course they do.

I mean people have a shit time and are bullied and treated badly in horrible schools outside of the private school system.

Of course that's true but you come home at the end of the day.

Well, you know the difference with boarding school is the boarding bit

and you have to

just survive it night after night and it's nights which were by far and away the worst.

You know certainly in terms of the bullying because then you really are on your own.

You're in the dormitory.

You might have 12 other boys.

If you're marked out as I was because I made this grand mistake of of crying on my first day there but also because I was a bit of a school weirdo you know I was obsessed by nature I had national health specs I was completely uninterested in sport and useless at it but I was swatty I was you know good at the academic work all those things mark you out as being someone who is going to get pounced on and it's at night that it happens.

You know, it could be bad during the day, but at night it was horrendous.

And then you got the sense that there's no escape.

You know, every night going to bed was a time of dread it was utterly brutal and horrible but my sister had it even worse because the teachers came up to the dormitories and joined in it was amazing there there is particularly her house mistress was part of the gang of bullies

and that

that drove her to her death I'm convinced of that.

I've got no doubt in my mind at all that anorexia was her only way out.

To sort of regain some control.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I know it's a cliche that it's about control, but yeah, it is.

That's the only thing.

The only autonomy she had was whether she ate or not.

Because everything else is stripped away from you.

You've got no privacy, you've got no separation from the system.

You're subject to the rules at all times.

And you've got other people constantly intruding into your life, whether it's the staff or whether it's the other pupils.

You know, they're there looking over you all the time.

And so you can't move.

You can't breathe breathe without someone telling you you're doing it wrong and she wasn't able to talk to your parents no no

it just wasn't a place they were prepared to go not not talking not not in a meaningful way yeah you know i remember the times when they would pick me up from school and in the car on the way home i'd try to say

I'm I'm being, you know, I'm being bullied, it's horrible, and the rest of it.

And my mum would say, oh, look at that pony, do you think she's pregnant?

And it would

like the shutters would just come down.

Right, there's no equipment there to have that conversation.

Yeah.

And again, you know,

I can't blame them for any of this.

I don't feel bitter about it.

It's more...

It's almost like I'm approaching it now in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

I don't feel it has to be forgiven, but it does have to be understood.

Yeah.

I guess some people though, as we've established, feel threatened by those conversations, by the idea that they may be blind to living their lives in a harmful way, either directly or indirectly.

So they get very defensive and

one of the things that is said about you is that, oh, you're just doing this out of a sense of self-interest and publicity, or I suppose it's a version of virtue signaling.

Like, look at me, I'm a great crusading guy, and I'm living my life better than you guys and you're all wrong and I'm right.

Does that criticism ever hit home?

Do you ever have moments where you're thinking, I don't know, do they have a point?

I mean, I constantly am checking myself.

I'm constantly asking, what is my motivation here?

What am I doing right now?

What's this actually about?

And of course, there's never a totally clear-cut answer.

Because everything you do is tangled up with who you are and where you've come from and stuff which you don't even know about.

you can't even put your finger on.

But, you know, the thing that I have consistently loved all my life is nature, is the living world.

I'm totally embedded in it and I always was.

And you know, you could say, well, this is a substitute for dealing with your own issues and stuff, but actually who cares?

You know, the living world is going down the toilet at horrendous speed.

We're using the planet as our dustbin.

We need to stop doing that.

And if there's one useful thing I can do in this short span on this earth it's to try to stop that process as well as I can

and you can ascribe all sorts of motives to why I might be doing that but basically I can't stand to see what we are doing to the living planet.

And

any successful campaign is an ecosystem.

It needs different people with different skills involved.

And

there are all sorts of things I can't do.

I've got a very limited skill set, but there are some things I can do.

I can do the research, I can understand stuff, and I can summarise it, and I can explain it to people.

And I feel my particular role is to try to dig into things which other people aren't covering, the neglected issues.

And that's why I get so much flack.

That's why so many people profess to hate me, whether they really do or not is another matter, but they profess to hate me, because I'm pointing the finger at industries which get almost no criticism at all, at sectors which are massively neglected, I feel, in journalism it by campaigners in society as a whole and so those sectors because there's very few people holding them to account turn on the few people who are and come up with all sorts of reasons why they might be being criticized it can't possibly be that we're doing anything wrong there must be something wrong with the person who's doing the criticism and you're also able to engage with your critics and are there times when you have reversed your position on certain things and when you've been public about that yeah yeah.

Nuclear power was a classic example of that.

I was very anti-nuclear.

I took the classic environmentalist line that nuclear power was a great blight and we should shut it down.

And it was Fukushima which changed my view because there was the top graded nuclear accident.

It hit the highest rating for a nuclear accident and no one died.

And yet in the ordinary course of fossil fuel operations, people are dying every hour or every day in coal mining accidents as a result of the pollution and primarily as a result of the climate breakdown and so even when

nuclear power went wrong it was still killing fewer people i.e zero than when fossil fuel burning goes right and yet in response to Fukushima you had the Japanese government the German government and others shutting down their nuclear programs which meant they were switching to fossil fuels so they were switching from what is despite all the stories about it a fundamentally harmless technology, certainly in terms of the impacts caused when the power is being generated, though the mining is another issue as it is with all fossil fuels, and switching towards an extremely harmful technology.

It occurred to me when I was watching the TV show Chernobyl that actually that show wasn't doing the cause of nuclear power any favours.

It was just cementing in people's minds the idea that it's a really harmful way of generating power.

It was a brilliant series and what the Soviet Union did in Chernobyl was an absolute catastrophe and no one should gainsay that, though the death rate was massively exaggerated.

But to judge current nuclear power by Chernobyl is to say it's too dangerous to fly because of the Hindenburg disaster.

And yet in the nuclear power sector as a whole, almost nobody dies ever.

You know, it's incredibly safe.

Per terawatt hour, it's among the very safest of all energy generating technologies.

Now there are special reasons for being suspicious of nuclear.

You know, it was originally nuclear power was very much tied up with nuclear weapons production, which of course is a horrible technology, which we ought to stop.

But there's also neophobia at work.

People are very afraid of new stuff.

And one of my roles as an environmentalist is to say to people, stop being afraid of new stuff because it's new.

Maybe some new stuff is inherently harmful, but being new does not make it harmful.

George, how would you you feel if I put some specific criticisms that I've read beneath some of your talks and articles?

Okay, cool.

These are just very cursory.

You know, I'm sure this conversation is frustrating for a lot of people because you are a divisive figure.

There will be people thinking like, you know, you're not pushing back.

George is giving you all this stuff.

You're not questioning it.

I disagree with him on so many issues.

And, you know, I apologise for that, listeners.

but

I am interested in George.

I wanted to talk to him.

He was kind enough to talk to me.

And

in some small way, I'm going to put a few criticisms to George now.

Some of these comments are things that I saw beneath an article by John Lewis Stemple.

Can you tell us who John Lewis Stemple is?

He's a farmer and author, and he takes a very different view to mine.

So he was talking about regenesis.

And he says, as part of his article, which was called Monbiot's Farming Fantasies.

Monbiot's solution is a farm-free future in which our farmland has been rewilded with exotic megafauna.

Think lions, elephants, giraffes.

What will we eat?

Bacterial soup grown in vats.

Such gloop can, apparently, be modelled into tasty dishes.

In an aral irony, a comedian would blush to construct Mombio's damascene conversion to this acetic diet came in hell sinky.

So that's nothing that you need to answer specifically, but that's the general tone of the article.

A specific comment underneath from someone called Mary McFarlane says, Perhaps George Monbiot should try farming instead of preaching, but then he might have to take responsibility.

I wonder what he eats.

Yeah, so I have a plant-based diet for environmental reasons.

I think it's about the biggest shift you can make as an individual.

You know, all the really important things we need to do are political and we do it together, but individually, the biggest thing you can do is to switch from an animal based to a plant-based diet.

It's a pretty good diet, it's varied.

I like my food.

I quite like cooking so that helps.

You do need to know how to cook if you're going to have a plant-based diet to be honest otherwise it's going to be a bit boring.

It's not as easy to cook as meat.

You just slap meat in a frying pan.

Because that's one obvious criticism is that if you're asking people to radically change the way they eat you are tinkering with a culture that is very deeply ingrained for people.

People are much less conservative than they think they are when it comes to food.

You see this motto, Michael Pollen came up with it, just constantly recited.

Don't eat anything your great-great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food.

I don't know anyone who says that who lives by it.

If my grandmother were to encounter the Thai food or the Indian food or the Vietnamese food or anything else that I eat, virtually anything that I eat, she would regard it with us as a horror.

No idea what my great-great-grandmother would have thought, but probably even worse.

And so we tell these stories about ourselves.

I would never eat that much.

But actually, then we change our diets and we're constantly changing our diets and in ways which we don't even seem to be aware of.

Yeah, exactly.

My experience was starting to try and eat more vegan food on a kind of experimental basis to see what it would be like.

And, you know, sprice price, it's fine.

It's really nice.

And now, I mean, I am not vegan or vegetarian.

I do eat some meat.

I don't eat any red meat at all anymore.

The idea of switching exclusively to veganism, if that was going to be helpful for everyone, that's not so terrible.

It's like better than the alternative.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, this is more simple.

Do cattle and sheep really bring an unprecedented amount of methane into the atmosphere?

I wonder.

Before the last few centuries, there were far more bison, buffaloes, deer, antelope, elephants, rhinos, hippos, etc.

These are, I believe, all ruminants, just like the domesticated animals now blamed for ecological disaster when when she says domesticated i think she just means you know farm animals farm animals the wild species would therefore likely produce as much methane per unit of weight as the farm animals i've wondered about this for some time now and would appreciate an answer from someone more knowledgeable than myself thanks

yeah i mean of course wild ruminants also produce methane but you know farm animals massively massively outnumber any number of wild ruminants i mean it's now the case that only 4% of all mammals by weight are wild.

4%.

36% is human beings, 60% is farm animals.

We kill 76 billion animals a year to feed ourselves.

I mean we're talking about a massive, massive industry with enormous numbers here and of course that has a huge methane output which just dwarfs anything found among wild mammals.

Undoubtedly the herds of domestic animals are much bigger than those of wild mammals would ever have been because they're everywhere.

You know, you would have had intensive, large herds of bison or wildebeest in some parts of the world, and they would have come together at certain times of year for their migrations, and it would look like a hell of a lot of animals.

But what we see here is that

all over the world nowadays, there are animals in fields at those densities everywhere.

So it's far, far greater impact.

But But also, we are where we are, and we have to address impacts, whatever they may be, wherever they're coming from.

And

the main source of human-generated methane is livestock.

And so, when we're dealing with methane, which is one of the most potent of all greenhouse gases, that's the thing we need to attend to first.

You hate sheep.

It sounds like you hate sheep.

You start your talks by just blaming the sheep.

Individually, they're all right.

A bit like teenagers, really.

It's when they get together.

Finally, in this section, a sort of general question, I suppose.

Why do the farmers have to pay for this situation?

Poor old farmers, like their lives are hard enough.

I appreciate you saying that that's not the case for a lot of farmers.

Some of them are big old millionaire farmers, and that's a different kind of thing.

But we're thinking of like the genuine hard scrabble

farmers with a way of life that they've inherited that's been part of the human experience of life on Earth for as long as we can imagine.

How are they going to adapt and how are their lives going to be transformed?

It's a sort of similar thing to what people are saying about AI.

Like, what's going to happen to all these...

What's going to happen to the journalists?

It's one of these things about the changing world is things need to change, but what's going to happen to all the people?

Well, you know, this has been the case.

It's the same with fossil fuels.

You know, when renewables take over, you have fewer people working in the fossil fuel industry.

When computers took over, there are fewer people making typewriters.

These changes do happen.

That's been a constant in human history.

But, you know, we can't just leave people to sink or swim.

You know, the way the coal miners were treated in this country was just disgusting.

And so what we need to do is to give people a gentle exit ramp.

And actually, we have a really effective means of doing that, which is farm subsidies.

You know, we're spending three billion a year in the UK on farm subsidies, mostly to keep a dysfunctional system running.

But if instead we use those subsidies to say, look, here's a way out.

Instead, we'll pay you to rewild your land.

There'll still be just as much employment, in fact, a lot more.

There's a lot of stats on this now showing that rewilding and a nature-based economy employs a lot more people and better jobs than the primary industries that it replaces.

We will fund this transition and it will be a just transition.

But just as in fossil fuels, we need the transition.

Otherwise there'll be no jobs for anyone.

There are no jobs on a dead planet.

And it's not as if anyone's pretending it's going to be an easy transition.

For an individual who has known that way of life for as long as they can remember and all their relatives have been farmers, for example, to suddenly change that way of life is going to be very painful as an upheaval.

Of course, of course.

But then that's happened time and time again.

Every time the subsidy system changes, farmers have to change and they make massive changes.

So for instance, when you had hedge payments, you were paid per animal.

Farmers absolutely crammed the hills with sheep to get as many animals on as they could to get that money.

The hedge payments were then stopped and they were paid by the hectare.

So farmers had a completely different incentive and had to radically change their farming system in response.

And when people say, I've always done it like this, it's just like when we talk about our diets, we've always eaten like this.

No, we haven't.

It changes all the time.

and the change is often quite sharp and quite disruptive.

But then we normalize that new situation and say, this is the baseline, we've always done it like this.

And sure, change is innately painful.

But if we don't change, we're stuffed.

We really are stuffed.

Change is absolutely essential to our well-being.

personal change, political change, economic change.

And particularly when we are faced with the greatest predicament humanity has ever encountered which is the possibility of earth systems collapse the collapse of our life support systems everything has to change to avert that

maybe as we wander back yeah we could have just a little coda which is talking about some of the things that make you hopeful yeah sure you're pointing in that direction but i think back is that way all right

i say that with something slightly tentatively because i always get my directions wrong actually i'll tell you what, I'll actually get my phone out

and cheat

because otherwise it will be horribly wrong.

We'll see where we're going.

Phones though, eh, George?

You've got to love phones.

Isn't it awful?

Isn't it awful?

Well, yeah, I mean, I sort of do.

I mean, I'm not one of these technophobic environmentalists.

I think that we make a terrible mistake in, I mean, some environmentalists do, in almost instinctively rejecting technology.

You know, some new technologies are an absolute nightmare and are going to cause enormous problems for us, but a lot of them just can greatly reduce our impacts, can

make life easier without doing any harm.

And

phones are one of those.

So that aspect of technology, that makes you hopeful for the future, I suppose.

Yes.

Some of the possibilities that technology might help us out of some of our...

Yeah, yeah.

And we desperately need new technologies, you know, whether those are new energy technologies, new food technologies, every sector has to change and has to change radically.

And to reject technology as part of that package is to try to deal with this problem with our hands tied behind our backs.

It's just stupid.

It doesn't make any sense at all.

What are the other things that give you hope?

Well, social movements, more than anything.

campaigners, young people rising up and saying, we don't put up with this.

We're just not going to tolerate seeing the living planet ripped apart for the purposes of profit.

And those social movements can become incredibly powerful.

In fact, that's the only thing which really drives change is getting enough people committed to change to reach what seems to be a social tipping point, which is the evidence seems to suggest about 25% of the population.

And then things can happen very quickly indeed.

You know, if you think of smoking, it wasn't many decades ago where every public space was filled with cigarette smoke.

Yeah.

And now,

you know, if you smoke, you do it furtively behind the dustbins.

It's like a guilty habit.

Or equal marriage.

You know, not long ago, equal marriage was going to be the end of civilized life as we know it.

And now the very same people will say, oh, well, of course, I've always, always believed in equal marriage.

You know, social tipping has happened.

Yes.

that enough people were committed to the new position that suddenly the rest of the population didn't want to be left behind.

And so if things did change the way you think they need to, what would that look like in practical terms?

What do people listening to this,

apart from going out and campaigning, which of course is an option as well, what does it look like in terms of most ordinary people's lives?

What does the tip look like?

Well, we need radically to change the technologies that we rely on.

You know, number one, just stop burning stuff.

We don't need to burn stuff anymore.

There are loads of different ways of producing power, lots of ways of producing electricity and of using electricity to do all the processes which we currently use fossil fuels for.

You just do not need to be burning fossil fuels or wood or anything else for that matter.

Change our diets.

These two things are the two most important things.

Switch away from an animal-based diet because

if we stop farming animals and leave fossil fuels in the ground, you've solved about 90% of the problem.

There's other things how to deal with too, you know, plastics, synthetic chemicals, and the rest of it, but actually those are the most important issues.

You've cracked most of it by doing that.

And

as environmentalists now, we're well tuned in to the fossil fuels issue.

We're much less aware of the need to stop farming animals.

But it's just as urgent in environmental terms.

Excuse me, which way do we go if we're heading towards White Ladies Road?

Over there.

Oh, the right, thank you.

The complete opposite direction.

Yeah, the completely opposite direction, that's it.

That's it.

The water tower there.

Yes, so if you turn right, the road that runs down there is the top of White Ladies,

what used to be Blackboy Hill.

Indeed, yeah, great.

Great.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks very much.

I'm glad we are.

Thank you.

There we are.

Even with my phone, I can't get the right direction.

How pathetic is that?

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back podcats.

That was George Mombio talking to me there.

And I was very grateful indeed to George for meeting me back there in Bristol, making the time to wander around and chat with me so warmly and generously.

And I've put some links to some of the things we spoke about in the description of today's podcast.

You'll find a link to George's website.

Where you can read his Guardian articles, you can see all the books that he has written over the years and all the other stuff that he is up to.

There's a video from 2022 with George in a kayak.

It's called Riverside, C-I-D-E.

And it is what was originally a live broadcast with George kayaking on the River Wye and talking about the disastrous pollution in that and so many other rivers.

There's a link to George and Ewan McLennan.

talking about breaking the spell of loneliness, the album that they did together.

It's a short video about their collaboration in 2016.

There is also a link to John Lewis Stemple's article in Unheard, George Monbiot's farming fantasies that I

quoted a little from, as well as a couple of the comments beneath that.

There's a link to George's article in The Guardian called Boarding Schools Warp Our Political Class.

And there's also a link to the interview that I watched with Richard Beard

about

boarding schools.

Private schools are trauma factories is the name of the video.

Ash Sarkar on Navarra Media is interviewing Richard Beard.

That was in 2023.

And there's other bits and pieces on there.

Anyway, once again, thank you very much indeed to George for making the time to talk to me.

We watched a good film last night.

that I thought I would share with you.

My eldest son, Frank, aged 21, currently is stepping up to the plate as the house's entertainment manager.

It used to be my position exclusively, I was responsible for the majority of the entertainment consumed by the residents of Castle Buckles.

But recently, Frank has been helping out, and actually, he's doing a better job than I would.

I struggle a lot of the time.

That's why we end up watching Epic Fail videos.

But Frank came up with a good movie last night that I hadn't even heard of that came out last year, 2023, called Promised Land.

It's a Danish film directed by Nikolai Arcell, based on a novel by Ida Jessen, which was in turn very loosely inspired by real-life characters.

And it is set in the 18th century in Denmark.

Impoverished war hero Captain Ludwig Kahlen sets out to tame a vast, uninhabitable land on which seemingly nothing can grow.

This beautiful but forbidding area is under the rule of Friedrich de Schinkel, a merciless nobleman who realizes the threat Kahlen represents to his power.

As a new community starts to settle in, de Schinkel swears vengeance, leading to a violent and intense confrontation between the two men.

It's quite good, it's a bit like, well, it reminded me a bit of Rob Roy, the version of Rob Roy that came out in the early 90s, I think,

with a almost cartoonishly villainous nobleman

who takes against Ludwig Kahlen played by Mads Michelson Amanda Collin is in it do you know her she's Danish actor or actress if you prefer she played mother in raised by wolves

did you see raised by wolves that was Ridley Scott's sci-fi series that came out in 2020 that occupies a strange mental space for me that series because

it came out toward I think I'm right in saying towards the end of 2020

after my mum died and after the first lockdown when I was feeling properly crazy

and

I watched Raised by Wolves because it was directed by Ridley Scott or at least the first few episodes were and it is what Some people might call batshit.

Two androids are tasked with raising human children on a mysterious virgin planet as the human colony threatens to be torn apart by religious differences.

And the androids learn that controlling the beliefs of humans is a treacherous and difficult task.

And Amanda Collin

is the chief android, who also, she discovers, has a past as a highly effective killing machine

that floats around and screams.

And when she screams, she's the necromancer.

And when she screams, people explode.

So there's a bit of that going on.

I can't remember if I talked about Raised by Wolves at the time or recommended it to you.

But we watched a whole lot.

It's also got Travis Fimmel in it, who was in Vikings.

Anyway, how did I get onto that?

Oh, yes, because of the promised land, which I recommend.

I think you can rent it off YouTube.

And there's, you know, it's violent,

but the violence is not totally graphic.

It's not like,

who's the guy that did dragged across concrete?

Anyway, if you've ever seen that, you'll know what I mean.

That I would class as

unnecessarily graphic violence.

Okay.

Oh yeah, I was going to say because I was talking to George about

King Charles's coronation last year.

It hadn't happened at that point when we were speaking.

I ended up doing a video in which I redubbed a few clips from the coronation in the same sort of way that I have with other similar ceremonies in the past on my YouTube channel.

And it was shown on 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown recently, an episode that I take towards the end of last year.

And Janice, who comes around to clean at Castle Buckles every now and again,

she is an older lady with, I would say, quite different tastes to mine on the whole, but she does like 8 out of 10 cats does countdown.

And I was excited to tell her that I was going back on there.

And then the show went out a few weeks back.

I was waiting for Janice to be all excited about having seen me on the show.

Nothing.

And then I finally couldn't resist saying, so did you see my coronation video, Janice, on 8 out of ten cats does countdown?

And she looked quite embarrassed, looked down at her tea,

and said, Yes, yes, I did see it.

I thought, oh dear.

I see you didn't like it.

She said, I didn't like you taking the Mickey out of King Charles.

I've got nothing against King Charles.

I wish him all the best with his health problems.

Sad to hear about it.

And I tried to explain to Janice that

my video wasn't about King Charles, it was about Regnon from Xantiar.

There was a whole setup.

I don't know if maybe they cut that out of 8 out of 10 cats does countdown.

And I found myself trying to justify my video a bit like Monty Python had when Life of Brian came out.

Saying, no, no,

it's not King Charles.

It's Regnon.

I would never say anything disrespectful about K Charles.

Anyway, I've gone down in Janice's estimation, which I feel bad about.

And if you saw the coronation video and were similarly affronted,

I apologise for the pain I've caused.

Okay, thanks very much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and his conversation editing on this episode.

I really appreciate it.

Seamus, thank you very much for all your hard work.

Thanks to Helen Green.

She does the artwork for the podcast.

Thank you to everybody at ACAST who works hard, liaising with my sponsors.

But thanks especially to you.

Now, I'm in a

squelchy bit of

waterlogged field here.

But if you don't mind your feet getting wet,

come over here.

Let's have a huggy.

Good to see you.

Thanks for coming back.

And until next time, we share the same squidgy field.

Please go easy.

and for what it's worth, I love you.

Bye

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