- Re: Monbiot deserves some kinder consideration. Archived Message
Posted by Ian M
on March 13, 2023, 10:15 pm, in reply to "Monbiot deserves some kinder consideration."
|
Hi John, I don't think he does actually, though I somewhat regret my glib remark. I'll go out on a limb and say that I think I've read more of Monbiot's output than you have. I started reading him around 2001 when trying to educate myself about geopolitics after the 9/11 attacks, and have kept tabs on him on and off ever since. My dislike of him is based on the attack dog role that Ken identifies which has seen him launch dishonest smears against many of the authors and activists I respect, from ML to Chomsky, Pilger, Dark Mountain, Corbyn, Brand and others. Also being involved in organic farming gives me a perspective on his environmental writing which reveals it as ungrounded, technocratic and deeply antagonistic towards people who have a real involvement with the land (as opposed to the alienated, city-based environmentalism which is based on aesthetic rather than practical concerns). Ask a farmer what they think of Monbiot one of these days, but be prepared for a lot of swearing! I read the submission you linked to, and have to concede the work that has gone in to reading & digesting all those scientific papers. There's not much I disagree with about his diagnosis of the problem, apart from pinning too much blame on livestock. But it's his proposed solutions that are completely out of whack, showing that it doesn't matter how much you read on some things - you actually have to have some practical experience of what you're talking about. I've critiqued the rewilding, renewable tech & lab grown food 'solutions' he proposes on these pages a number of times... Monbiot is an eco-tourist with a science degree (biology, if I recall). If he's ever grown anything in his life he hasn't written about it, as far as I have noticed. That kind of alienation leads, as Monbiot might put it, to some very dangerous, dark places. Or as Bill Mollison, co-founder of the permaculture movement put it: 'I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them. When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies. But if you get someone who looks after himself and those around him – like Scott Nearing, or Masanobu Fukuoka – that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.' cheers, I |