 Hello, I'm Claire Hymer and I am joined in the Burso London office by prolific author and environmental journalist George Monbiot. George, thank you very much for joining us on the Vora media. Thanks Claire. So you've just published out of the wreckage a new politics for an age of crisis. We know what an age of crisis, this age of crisis is, but what do you mean by a new politics? We're kind of stuck in the long 20th century in a way in that we still have 20th century economics, primarily neoliberalism which failed catastrophically in the last century and in this century but also Keynesianism which worked tremendously well for about 30 years in the 20th century but for various reasons hasn't got so much to offer in the 21st. We've got 20th century technologies like thermal power plants and the internal combustion engine and hoisting people 30,000 foot into the air when you want to have a conversation and factory farms and all this stuff and we've got 20th century politics with our first part of the post strictly representative system untempered by participation and we are just desperately in need of a massive rethink a radical transformation of all of that and there is the opportunity now to do it because it's become so evident to almost everyone that the system is bust and what we need to pull it all together is a new political narrative and there's a basic template for political narratives which works very well which is a restoration story template which says disorder affects the land caused by the nefarious activities of people working against the interests of humanity the heroes of the story who might be one person group of people in an institution fight that disorder overthrow the nefarious forces and restore order to the land in whatever form this might take now this is the successful narrative structure of almost all political and religious transformations and the reason I believe we're stuck with neoliberalism today despite its massive failures is that we haven't produced a new narrative of our own so what I seek to do in this book is to sketch out what that new narrative might be and can you do that for me now what does that new politics look like for you well it's based on the extraordinary findings in a whole series of different disciplines which seem to have converged on one point in neuroscience and psychology and anthropology and evolutionary biology and they all point to the fact that humankind by comparison to any other animal is spectacularly altruistic I mean way off the scale we don't see it this way partly because we're attuned to danger partly because the people who rise to the top tend to be the psychopaths but partly because of this crushing stifling belief in selfishness and greed almost as a good thing which neoliberalism has massively enhanced with this sort of neo-hobzian narrative of a war of all against all and that extreme individualism and extreme competition of good things greed is good because that will make some people extremely rich and their wealth as we well know will trickle down to enrich everybody else and we've absorbed and internalized that story and as a result of that and developments over many centuries our good nature has been thwarted and you could fit this into the restoration story by saying the land has been thrown into disorder because our enormous potential to work together to work for each other to cooperate to more than reciprocate an altruism which goes beyond reciprocity to empathize to build community to stand together against our common threat threats has been overthrown by the this combination of disastrous circumstances and our task we the heroes of the story the ordinary people of the land who actually are much better than we think we are is to rediscover our good nature and by and build it through building community sure so we seem to be living in an age where we've got high voter turnout we're seeing a polarization in terms of politics and high levels of political engagement as well and obviously this isn't your first book you've written lots of books before who is your audience for this book and is that different from previous books that you've written well i always write the book that i want to write so the audience is me i mean like my belief is that if i i write a book where i think this is something i would like to get to the end of then maybe other people will feel the same thing because i you know i can't insert myself into the mind of anyone else my hope is that with this amazing flowering of opportunity and possibility and promise that we now see all around the world as people begin to recognize that the old system is bust and that we need a radical change it will appeal to people who are involved in in in the new movements and the Corbyn movement the momentum movement over here the Saunders movement in the US or what what is now emerging we hope in the democratic party that there's so much exciting stuff now going on around the world and i just want to feed in to that enthusiasm and i'm not saying i've got all the answers and i'm not saying i'm the only one who's got something interesting to say but i'm hoping that it can be one of the building blocks of the new world that we want to make let's turn specifically to the green movement so the Rio Earth Summit was 25 years ago of course co2 levels are now far higher than they were in 1990 do you think that the environmental movement has failed look we as a movement have questioned ourselves interrogated ourselves for years saying what do we do wrong you know were we too harsh towards business were we not harsh enough towards business where we insufficiently radical where we insufficiently moderate did we did we get old techie or did we abandon technology and the fact is we are simply outgunned you know we are up against not just the political machine which just is not interested at all because basically it's counter-aspirational and it's so much easier to tell people a charming lie than a brutal truth up against the media which is even more counter aspirational it is run by billionaires who do not want to see any radical change up against a dark money network of all the think tanks funded by people like the coke brothers and exon who work extremely hard to mislead and confuse and bamboozle people about issues like climate breakdown and indeed about other environmental issues as well with their enormous amount of spending but we're also up against the way the public mind has been created particularly by neoliberalism which is this thing I must satisfy my own needs first and then think about possibly think about other people's needs but this is about self maximization you know we're constantly told you are homo economicus you must elbow everyone else out the way you must grab for yourself what you can and you must get the fastest Ferrari and if you don't have the fastest Ferrari you're inferior to the person who does have the fastest Ferrari and our values have been pushed by that political environment towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum the self enhancing self maximizing end rather than the self accepting and empathetic and community minded and the intrinsic end and that creates a very hostile environment for environmentalism and you're up against this sort of hedonic treadmill people's dopamine hits from constant escalating consumption you're up against the entire economy which basically depends on infinite growth on continued growth which amongst those who have any spending power means ever more ridiculous products because their needs have been met their strong desires have been met their weak desires have been met so now you've got to tell sell them preposterous junk which they never would have wanted in a month or Sundays so we're up against all of that and we expect it to win but part of the problem is that we didn't create a new narrative and an overarching massive new narrative which says we reset we have a sort of metaphysical mutation where we say right complete change in the way we see the world that is what's needed so I completely agree obviously that the environmental movement is up against a very hostile environment do you do you not think that there are any specific problems with the environmental movement itself like did it ever intend to be a mass movement or was it always something that has been thought of as a kind of activist elite like I think compared to maybe some other social movements like the environment is yes kind of cultivated an activist elite to kind of do things on the sidelines away from politics almost like it's depoliticized in a there has been an element of that but you know you've got to see it as something which has been really torn I mean I was very aware of this in the 1990s when I was heavily involved in the direct action movement against road building and did a lot of digger diving and tree sitting and stuff like that and got hospitalized kindly by some friendly security guards and and you know there was huge tension huge tension between the direct activists and the established NGOs who said only leave it to us just send your membership dues and you know we'll go off in the rubber dinghies and do the exciting stuff and you know you don't have to and we didn't want that we wanted you know we we felt this was an urgent crisis as it remains an urgent crisis and we wanted to put our bodies in between the earth criminals and the earth but and you know eventually we did actually win round the the major groups by and large but that tension remains to an extent not quite so much but it is still still there there's no question about it and you know it should be I believe much more of a grassroots movement as a whole but you know remember we just we haven't cracked it we haven't worked out a way which is highly successful which is a sort of cast down formula for getting it done and sometimes we need the big institutional NGOs because sustaining the energy of grassroots activists across decades is extremely difficult sure you talk a lot in the book about putting communities at the centre of our political lives and certainly if we look at examples like anti-fracking campaigns in Lancashire it seems that climate activism in the UK often starts with the local. How can we scale up these efforts to deal with the global aspects the global problems that climate change is? Yeah I mean this is where the political system is completely out of phase with the environmental crisis just as it is with any other crises but particularly in this case where you've got a set of governments who you know what they want to do is to make the story go away they don't want to actually deal with climate breakdown stop climate breakdown from happening by the way I call it climate breakdown all the time because climate change is a ridiculous thing to call it it's like calling a foreign invasion unexpected guests we're talking about an existential crisis here this is climate breakdown that we're facing and you know they just want the issue to go away so people stop talking about it that's all they want because it just messes up everything you know all their nice cozy relationships with corporations all their five-year plans everything just just goes by the wayside because it does just question all the premises on which our politics and economics has been created but you need international action for this to happen and so the only way that anything can happen is by the fusion of grassroots movements across the world that's anyway anything ever has happened really and um and and in this case you know we've got a massive task because we're up against such enormous forces including the indifference of a very large number of people you know that's the biggest thing I find myself you know I get really frustrated about dealing with government dealing with the media but I get despairing about just trying to persuade people that this is an issue worth worth engaging with and of course the people who've got the most money are the most powerful in this case because they spend their way too environmentally oblivion and they're the hardest to reach I guess I'd also want to ask so obviously climate change um is a global problem in that um it stems from and has similar histories to colonialism imperialism do you think that focusing on the local and starting with the local in the UK can address those aspects of the problem look we we just have to do what we can we've got such limited resources now and and there's no way I want to say the anti-fracking campaigners aren't doing it right because you know they are you know they're getting twatted by police on a daily basis you know and and and they're having all these sort of bespoke laws ranged against them and all these sort of civil injunctions and horrible horrible stuff you know and it's frightening and it's nasty and they are very brave and amazing people and you know so that so you know I can and will in no way say oh I think they ought to be doing this instead or that instead what they're doing is what they can do and that's as much as any of us can do and sure we absolutely it needs to be a movement led by the global south oriented towards the global south and all the rest of it and there's a huge amount of international global work to be done bringing together the concerns of people in many parts of the world and you know in fairness quite a lot of people have been working on trying to do that but we're just we're weak by comparison to the behemoths that we're up against doesn't mean we can't beat them but we had to be very very clever about this can living standards improve in a world without fossil fuels uh yeah I mean first of all let's ask what living standards are you know is living standards high living standards having a new Ferrari I don't believe that that's necessary you know what I want to see is a world in which we have private sufficiency and public luxury and just as a matter of physical space that's really the only option if we want everybody to have a high standard of life because if you're all going to have your own swimming pool in your own tennis court there literally is not enough physical space unless every city is going to sprawl across an area the size of England it's just not going to work um and already you know the UK uses many times its own environmental footprint in grabbing the earth's resources so you know how do we resolve people's aspirations for a high quality of life for prosperity for well-being with environmental limits and the only way to do it is to invest in public luxury rather than in private luxury you know you can have great parks you can have great sports facilities you can have great clubs and youth centres and public toilets even you know I mean not you don't have private toilets as well but you know there's there's all sorts of amazing things you can do in the public sphere which make the need for private luxury redundant but for that to happen you need that change of the story again sure um you write in the book a lot about neoliberalism what you write less about is capitalism to what extent do you see the climate crisis that we face as being just one of the facets of a crisis of capitalism that includes the financial crisis and so on well I mean fundamentally capitalism is incompatible with an environmental future partly because it is dependent on continuous growth and the planet is not growing so eventually that bumps into planetary limits and we're already seeing that happening um what I've tried to do in the book is to start exploring the core of an alternative movement to capitalism and different economics entirely I mean part of the mistake I feel we've been making all all the time is talking about economics as if it's just a battle between the market and the state how much should the state have how much should the market have and we sort of position ourselves somewhere along that spectrum but there's actually four sectors to the economy there is the market there's a state there's a household and there's the commons and those two other sectors are perennially neglected because a household is neglected as a sector women's work is undervalued um and you know it's been this way since the beginning I mean that lovely book who cooked Adam Smith's dinner you know but you know what was the invisible hand oh it was the invisible hand of Adam Smith's mother doing all the work which he completely ignores and that's what was keeping the whole economy going and still is but then there's the commons which you know it was just scarcely discussed I mean it's beginning to come into the discourse now but it's it's been out of it for far too long and this you know most of the world was once the commons resources owned by communities managed by those communities for the benefit of those communities alone which couldn't be sold off couldn't be given away they were inalienable resources and they were they were there for the people and run by the people and the great thing about the commons as opposed to state provision and I'm not saying for a moment there should be no state provision but we need to balance it great thing about the commons is it fosters what I call the politics of belonging it fosters a sense of ownership a sense of control a sense of being rooted a sense of belonging to the place in which you live which I think is absolutely crucial you know and and all I mean so much about Brexit so much about Trump is is is what happens when you raise spectres out of the dust and powder of atomized communities Hannah Arendt wrote about this very persuasively and and unless people have a sense of belonging and and a sense of having some control over their economic and political life they are going to go for an anti-politics which is catastrophic which could lead to the resurgence of fascism we're seeing that happening across Europe and so by building belonging into our politics and not an exclusive belonging not the idea of you know we're keeping everyone out but basically anyone who lives in a place can belong on equal footing and the commons belong to them and commons is what makes sense of community we create an economy which not only is not based on growth is not based on the accumulation of capital is not based on profit but is based on delivering steady prosperity and well-being which is what the commons have always done but which also tells you you are someone you belong in this community the community belongs to you you are cared for you are heard and it's that counter to alienation which I think is absolutely crucial to political transformation thinking very specifically about the UK where do you think building the commons sits with say Corbinism and what do you think the biggest challenges are going to be or would be for enacting it I think Corbinism is a long way down that road already there's a lot in some of the recent speeches and in the manifesto about cooperatives some cooperatives are commons and some commons are cooperatives and by no means all are both but you know they've already kind of got it and they are open to discussion about taking it further I mean that's that's my experience so far and in a quite an exciting way I mean for me the key here is the land at the moment we have a rontier economy you know you can work your butt off you know from six in the morning till eight at night doing really crappy jobs to just earn enough to pay the rent to someone who's lying on a beach on the other side of the world and only comes home every six months to raise the rent you know you are doing all the work for them that that that is basically how our economy works and all this stuff about the enterprise economy and about wealth creators and stuff actually the real story of what's been going on in the neoliberal era in Britain and in many other parts of the world is a humongous rise of rent not just for property but rent in all sorts of ways you know the privatised public utilities where you just put a toll booth in front of them and charge people for access you know this is how all the robber barons of the world have become rich and but but particularly with land and property you know this is where this really gets to the heart of the matter in Britain which is you know people say oh it's a financial sector well absolutely it's a financial sector which is the heart of it but the financial sector interacting with the property sector that's where the real power lies in this country and where the real money is made by sucking it out of the pockets of people who are working their butts off on the minimum wage and and and so it's that sort of institutional theft which we have to address and and the first way I would come at it is say right first of all big land value taxation on valuable property it's not even tax it's just reclaiming the money which we've given to them through building the infrastructure which has made their property valuable then you take that money some of it is taxed by government some by local government to pay for essential services but the residue remains with the community and the community can then because it sets up a commons trust and can decide what to do with that money and it kind of the pay it out as a basic income to its members it could use it to build amenities or it could use it to buy land one of the great things about land value taxation it brings down the price of the land you start buying land you can build your own social houses you can do all sorts of exciting things but the essential thing in my view is that it's a community that's in charge of that process okay changing the topic slightly you wrote in a piece last year that you think the media is more to blame than the fossil fuel industry for climate change can you explain what you mean by that well obviously the media creates the political environment which grants a social license to operate to the fossil fuel companies and it has systematically shut down environmental voices shut down environmental consideration of all issues and it has framed economic issues and political ones in such a way that you don't even think about it you know so you know just you know systematic thing on the BBC the good news is that car sales are up you know government's extremely worried that that gross rates might go down from 3.2 percent to 3.1 percent and so everything is from the perspective of growth and particularly extractivism the growth in extractive and polluting industries you know that's that's always valorized above all others and and this the corporate perspective of almost all media almost all established media as opposed to the alternative media has made it almost impossible to get headway on environmental issues and they the way in which have excluded the issue but the way also in which they have mocked and belittled anyone who tries to raise it and you know with seeds or systematic denial going on but just just total marginalization obviously you're very well known for The Guardians Keep It In The Ground campaign recently journalists such as John Harris and Nick Robinson have decried what they see as the rise of advocacy and journalism how do you respond to that well I think we need both you know I think it's essential to have people who are genuinely trying to report the news impartially you see very little of that you know and what often what the media calls impartiality is anything but it's just siding with where power happens to lie and you know when you need the media most is when it's least useful because it just goes with the status quo wherever it might go and you know the media can't see that it's got a culture it can't see that it reflects a certain worldview and that reflects the culture of journalists themselves and that they are a very particular group of people who don't aren't actually representative for the rest of the nation it finds out almost impossible to see so you know the principle of impartiality and reporting is a very good one very seldom to be seen but the principle is a good one but you also need people who say to hell with all that you know I care about this stuff there is such a thing as ethics and I'm going to devote my life to trying to make the world a better place to try to fight the bad stuff and promote the good stuff that is not an invalid thing for a journalist to do that is a very good thing for a journalist to do it shouldn't be the only thing that journalism does but there has to be a space for it there it is absolutely essential and and the idea that campaigning journalism is some sort of aberration some sort of eccentricity and we need to weed it out I mean it wishes what the BBC has done completely I mean since I worked there back in the days when the world was young you know it's been completely eradicated but I think any news organisation needs to have both and and and I you know I've got no shame at all about saying yeah I am trying to make things happen not very successfully most of the time but you know I'm trying to push things in one direction because that's where I believe it as long as you're open about that and honest about it and you've got a registry of interest where all your financial interests are there so that you know you're not actually advocating on behalf of someone without telling people then I didn't see anything wrong with that and finally how do you identify yourself politically and do you feel that this has a bearing on your climate politics well as a matter of principle I've never joined a political party and that's because even as an advocate journalist as a campaigning journalist I believe that you should feel yourself free to criticise any party well especially as a campaigning journalist you know if a party falls short of your expectations you know and and you want them to go one one way and they're going another then you should feel free to do so without feeling any loyalty towards that party and in a way and it's a weird thing you know someone who strongly believes in belonging community a good journalist shouldn't have any loyalties except to particular principles and as a campaigning journalist you know my loyalties are to social justice and environmental defence and human rights and stuff but but if you attach your loyalties to any particular person or party then that's where I think you can find yourself getting into all sorts of problems because you find yourself with split incentives then so so yeah I keep out of party politics but I find myself pretty well to the left of almost everyone and basically if they go further left I tend to go further left I mean beyond them is what I'm saying because I feel that that's you know I want to drag people further to the left so would you say are you a socialist are you a communist can you broadly describe what you feel you are politically no I find it really difficult actually I do find it really difficult I mean I'm an environmentalist first and foremost and to be an effective environmentalist you need to be a bit of a socialist and a bit of an anarchist I feel and I'm sort of I've got elements of both you know I totally recognize the need for the state at certain points and I think the need for community is also essential at other points and so you know and what I've tried to do here is to sort of carve out a slightly different politics from the mainstream politics that you'll find in any party and you know and I call it the politics of belonging other people might have a better might have a better name for it but it's sort of and it does have some elements of statism and some elements of the commons and community and anarchism in it and I don't see a problem with mixing it great thank you very much thank you