Quotes from George Monbiot

This, as far as I can discover, was the first concrete step taken in Wales towards reintroducing an extinct mammal. Here, at Blaeneinion, at the source of the stream which runs through the stunning Cwm Einion into the Dyfi estuary, a group of volunteers had enclosed three acres of land around an old carp pond. People had been talking about returning the beaver to Wales for years. Now, at last, something was happening.

The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion! D. H. Lawrence Mountain Lion

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins Inversnaid

Evidence supporting James Lovelock's 'Gaia hypothesis' – that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system – appears, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating.

An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right.

Many times have I stolen gems from the depths And presented them to my beloved shore, He takes in silence but still I give For he welcomes me ever. Khalil Gibran Song of the Wave

Si la hipocresía es la distancia que hay entre nuestros principios y nuestro comportamiento, es muy fácil no ser nunca un hipócrita; basta con no tener ningún principio.

By rebuilding community, we will renew democracy and the hope we invest in it. We will develop political systems that are not so big that they cannot respond to us but not so small that they cannot meet the problems we face. We will achieve something that, paradoxically, we cannot realise alone: self-reliance. By helping each other, we help ourselves. The strong, embedded cultures

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci used the term 'cultural hegemony' to describe the way in which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are universalized. They become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which shape our thinking. Perhaps we suffer from agricultural hegemony: what is deemed to be good for farmers or landowners is deemed, without question or challenge, to be good for everyone.

Sheep farming in this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to have noticed.

We have not wholly shed our sense of a sacred duty to proclaim 'dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'.

Another paper calculates that if a magic switch were thrown, causing the entire world to shift to a plant-based diet, and the land now occupied by livestock were rewilded, the carbon drawn down from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would be equivalent to all the world's fossil fuel emissions from the previous sixteen years.[218] This drawdown could make the difference between our likely failure to prevent more than 1.5°C of global heating, and success.

The fells contract, regroup in starker forms; Dusk tightens on them, as the wind gets up And stretches hungrily: tensed at the nape, The coarse heath bristles like a living pelt. William Dunlop Landscape as Werewolf

By damaging the potential for wildlife tourism in Scotland, the deer and grouse industries could be destroying more employment than they generate.

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green Thought in a green Shade. Andrew Marvell The Garden

My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed T. S. Eliot 'The Waste Land

To know what comes next has been perhaps the dominant aim of materially complex societies. Yet, having achieved it, or almost achieved it, we have been rewarded with a new collection of unmet needs. We have privileged safety over experience; gained much in doing so, and lost much.

So why is this happening? The answer is like the Ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail. When you have followed it all the way round you find yourself back where you started.

It was when I saw these places in the 1980s that I felt called to do something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant trees, I asked myself: what's the message in the land? What's the story it's telling us? My question was: "What's Nature seeking to do here?" That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination. Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.

To visit the Bia?owie?a Forest in eastern Poland, which is as close to being an undisturbed ecosystem as any remaining in Europe, in May, when dozens of flower species jostle each other in an explosion of colour, is to see how much Britain is missing, and the extent to which boar transform their environment.

Already, boar are being killed here by the Forestry Commission and other owners at rates that could wipe them out. Among the commission's justifications is that they cause 'substantial damage' to woodlands.17 What does this mean? The notion of damage to native ecosystems by a native species at numbers well below its natural population is nonsensical. What the Forestry Commission calls damage a biologist calls natural processes.

Trees for Life.

To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration.