 10 years ago, George Monbiot wanted us to accept nuclear power. Now he wants us to accept genetically modified food. What's going on here? The answer is the environment movement's takeover by eco-modernists, and the way that social media influencers are now being used to sell everything, from business plans to entire ideologies. Now, I'm very sorry, but this is an unnecessarily long video. It's a deep dive into the role green pundits have in the ecological debate. It examines two issues that, try as I might over many weeks. I just couldn't separate. Firstly, there's the rise of multi-level marketing, the use of social media influencers to sell not only products, but also ideas and ideologies via the internet. As legacy media, traditional newspapers and broadcast TV decline, so advertisers and think tanks are shifting towards the use of social media influencers and micro-targeted online content to push your lobby for their particular business plan. Secondly, the environment debate in Britain is maintained by a few unaccountable figures elevated to the role of eco gatekeepers, which is why the ecological debate fails to make any real progress. That's not only shutting down alternative viewpoints, but as influencers, these people are being manipulated to push questionable viewpoints on the ecological crisis. We should be holding the political establishment's feet to the wildfire on ecological issues. Instead, a handful of reformers, promoting schemes or proposals which don't radically upend the ideological landscape, are given preferential access to the public debate. To pedal, multi-level marketing style, demonstrate wrong ideas about how to solve the ecological crisis. How do we hold these media-constructed pundits who claim to represent our interests to account? It's all about the evidence. To be clear, this isn't just about George Monbiot specifically, by its nature, this is also a discussion about the overwhelming class divide in the English environmental movement, since it's the London-centric English media and campaign groups which dominate this space. As a Guardian columnist, George Monbiot essentially states opinion, not facts, and George is not alone. I could equally cite journalists such as David Shuckman, highly ideological shows such as Countryfile, industry-backed pundits like Mark Linus, or green entrepreneurs such as Dale Vince. As these figures overwhelmingly embody the affluent middle-class values of the establishment, that debate not only downplays the trends which are the result of that lifestyle, but also fails to connect the people who stand to benefit the most in this debate, the average person living within the increasingly precarious UK economy. Instead, what passes to radicalism in English environmentalism are groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, but these groups are not radical. They are once again dominated by the middle class, and their metropolitan focus alienates them from the rest of Britain. Therein, just like the media's green pundits, the groups considered to be radicals in the public debate are statist, unwilling to look beyond the ideology, structures, and lifestyle created by Western affluence and consumption. They cannot encompass, in terms of its original meaning of, from the roots, any truly radical solution to the ecological crisis. Right now, there are subtle changes in green lobbying taking place, driven by changes in the media and advertising, linked to the manipulation of the public debate by social influencers, primarily working through social media and paid for content rather than the traditional legacy media. In the 1990s, I was an elected director of Friends of the Earth at an auspicious moment. Green had gone mainstream, and the pressure was to drop any hair-shirtered ideas for ecological change, not only to ride that media machine to get coverage, but also to soak up the money sloshing around from government and corporate interests desperate to greenwash their image. This position was openly articulated by Jonathan Parrott, one of those most directly responsible for rejecting radical thinking from first-degree party, then Friends of the Earth. In his 2005 book, Capitalism as if the world matters, he states, incremental change is the name of the game, not transformation, and that, of course, means that the emerging solutions have to be made to work within the embrace of capitalism. Like it or not, capitalism is now the only economic game in town. For fear, perhaps of arriving at a different conclusion, there is an unspoken and largely untested assumption that there need be no fundamental contradiction between sustainable development and capitalism. Three decades on, and that approach has clearly failed, and arguably has diluted the movement's influence within the noise created around these issues. More recently, though, this process has shifted reflecting the economic pressures on the legacy media, driven by the new online social influencer multi-level marketing machine. As green issues have matured against the background noise of the ecological crisis, and as government in action has shifted towards half-hearted targets, quotas, and especially subsidies, the pressure for environmentalists to promote certain issues has shifted from one of making change to promoting a business plan. In part the result of neoliberal values infiltrating all levels of society, green ideas have ceased to be an advocacy for political action. Instead, they advocate for one infrastructure plan or another, which seeks to green the modern lifestyle without changing it. As regulation, let alone limits or prohibition, becomes a dirty word in the skewed to the right media environment, so ecological issues are expected to perform within the processes of the corporate world. This is the environment which has spawned eco-modernism. Today, the basis for most discussions about future change is stasis. Proposals do not challenge business as usual, which is why the idea is being publicly debated seeks to preserve the core of the way things are. This is the contradictory paradigm within which George Monbiot is trapped. His columns in the Guardian are sparsely sourced and sometimes factually flawed. My last public deconstruction of one of his columns was published in May 2020. When he attacked the then recently released film, Planet of the Humans. I wrote a 20 page complaint about the column, with numerous academic references to the Guardian's readers editor. I never received an acknowledgement, despite sending it twice. The structural flaw in George's Guardian column was the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It suggested that as right-wing climate deniers like Michael Moore's new film, then the position that more depicted must be friendly to climate denial too. In reality, many anti-greens didn't like the film's message. The reason they talked up the film was precisely because the message made liberal environmentalists in America feel uncomfortable. The column attacked the film's assertion, that photovoltaic panels produce little energy once manufacturing costs are considered. George says, On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil fuel energy required to build and install it. It would appear George hadn't read his source. It states those figures cannot be quoted in that context, because it underestimates the impacts of the panels by 30 to 250%. In that same paragraph, he attacks the filmmaker's statement that you use more fossil fuels to do this than you're getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place. That quote has been taken out of context. That statement is not about solar PV or wind power. It's about the gas-fired Ivan Parr solar array, a wholly different type of technology to PV. George then goes on to state, Planet of the humans also claims that you can't reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy. Coal is instead being replaced by gas. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the official energy statistics in the USA show is happening. From 2010 to 2019, as old coal-fired plants are retired, they were replaced with new, larger gas-fired plants, using the large quantities of fracked natural gas being produced at that time. There is also academic research to back up the point made in the film. George then goes on to state that, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuels used for power generation has halved since 2010. The third quarter is late summer, when power demand is at its lowest and solar hits maximum. It's not representative of the average demand and supply. More significantly though, what's been dominating energy trends in Britain has been the collapse of electricity demand. That is in part the result of austerity-choking growth, and especially heavy industries, such as metals and chemicals, moving offshore. Those effects are far more significant than new renewable capacity in cutting fossil fuel use, but that doesn't even merit a mention. Especially over 2015 and 2016, much of the retired coal-fired capacity was matched by natural gas, not new renewable capacity. Increasing renewable capacity was roughly balanced by the reduction in nuclear generation, and the fact electricity demand shrank by over a fifth, from 2010 to 2019, means that in percentage terms, without adding a single wind turbine or solar panel, the proportion of renewable energy would have increased anyway. Georgian introduces the most toxic argument which eco-modernists promote to silence opposition, accusations of malfusely and population control, where again the film is misquoted. The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament, the most toxic of all possible answers. We really have to start dealing with the issue of population, without seeing some sort of made-a-dive-in population, there's no turning back. George's column uses an ellipsis to run two sentences together in the extract from the film. That jump wasn't just a few words or a sentence, it skips almost two minutes of discussion. In running those statements together, it completely ignores the context within which each was made, specifically the issue regarding the use of energy in agriculture. His column concludes this section by stating, High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low, when wealthy people, such as Maureen Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying in effect, it's not us consuming, it's them breeding, it's not hard to see why the far-right loves this film. I challenge the Guardian's editors to find any point in the transcript of the film where this is implied, and to listen to the caveats about the rich nation's consumption which were made throughout the film. In fact, during that ellipsis where George admits what is discussed, it is stated, we have to have our abilities to consume reined in because we're not good at reining them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources. George Mambo is not promoting the objective evidence-based view of our predicament. He is promoting ideological, idealized vision for how the affluent states can continue their current lifestyle by adopting new and more efficient technologies, a sort of ecological, have your cake and eat it too. That's not a problem, objectively, I'm doing the same too, by making these observations, albeit from a radically different perspective. Instead, what we need to pursue is why George Mambo, apparently winningly, misquotes what is said in the film to cast slurs about right-wing conspiracies, uses academic research in a manner that is specifically excluded by its authors, misrepresents official energy statistics to imply something they do not show, and thus, overall, denies what a large body of research evidence now demonstrates to be a fair assessment of our ecological predicament. Sorry to butt in with a quick ad-lib, but if you'd like to see more content like this, then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my YouTube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below, and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in this messed up world, and if we're going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. It isn't just George doing these kinds of myths or selective quoting. Here's but one example of a broadly similar trend. That's because ecomodernism has a data problem. First advanced by figures such as Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Aymary Lovin's, ecomodernism came out of the American environmental movement in the 1980s, proposing a simple idea. The only way to beat the destructive business process is to do business better than they can, in an ecological way, the assumption being that higher efficiency would enable economic competition due to higher productivity and hence profitability. Though there are various manifestos and institutes, ecomodernism is not a coherent group. It represents a spectrum of ideas. Generally though, ecomodernism is heavily influenced by liberal economic theory. The idea of free globalised markets are relanced on technological innovation and efficiency to drive down impacts while driving up productivity, the maintenance of property rights, and the unquestioned adherence to the western lifestyle and the need to perpetuate the affluence of material consumption that lifestyle demands. This is where ecomodernism hits the reality of the ecological crisis. For all their protestations, basically the firmer dynamics say no. In particular, energy efficiency is not open-ended. It's a one-time saving after which wholly new technologies must be invented or systems significantly changed. And in general, it's a diminishing return with fixed theoretical limits where each improvement saves less and less. At the heart of ecomodernism's ideas is decoupling, the assumption that the use of technology can break the link between human lifestyles and their ecological impact, which currently has no strong evidence to support it. As with neoliberal ideology in general, ecomodernists will not accept strong ecological limits. Despite the fact that recent research confirms that after 50 years, the limits to growth study is still on track. And they do not consider the embodied footprint of their activities on resource depletion and pollution, and if pressed will invoke the quasi-mystical power of innovation to solve that without proof of its feasibility. From the strongly technocratic end of the ecomodernist spectrum, that transition is innately collected to nuclear power, despite the fact there's not enough uranium to do this. For the stronger ecological end of ecomodernism, that transition is connected to the use of 100% renewable energy, despite the growing evidence to show that there are insufficient mineral resources to construct the scale of infrastructure required to replace the energy service of fossil fuels. When I give lectures, this is the point where people are often confused. If the highly technological solution to climate change is not possible, and the renewable solution to climate change is not possible, then what option is there? The fact people commonly ask this question demonstrates why George Monbiot and the other ecomodernist pundits in the media have become an obstruction to the ecological debate. There's an entire movement around degrowth and the simplification of human lifestyles, which is not currently being referenced within the UK media. That's because it challenges the implicit bias of mainstream environmentalism. It entails reducing material affluence and tackling the excessive consuming lifestyles through the national and global redistribution of resources. Take, for example, electric cars. The media debate is presented as the divide between petrolheads and green consumers, but neither side ever enters into a discussion to justify maintaining the private car as the priority for moving around. In 2020, the Climate Change Committee canvassed opinion on electric vehicles. An expert panel assembled by the Natural History Museum told the Climate Change Committee that to replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles, would take 207,900 tonnes of cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes of copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters of the world's lithium production and 12% of the world's copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire cobalt needs of European industry. Mineral resources are a significant barrier, and the Climate Change Committee's response to this critical issue being spelled out by Britain's preeminent geological institute was silence. A briefing they publish later doesn't even mention the issue. Put that case differently, a grid-powered trolleybus moves passengers many times more efficiently than multiple battery-powered cars. So where is the lobby for the elimination of cars? It does exist, but it gets little media coverage, as it challenges one of the dominant assumptions of the consumer lifestyle, the primacy of the private car. Renewable energy in green technologies, such as electric cars, are dependent upon mass electrification, and as a result, a huge expansion in metal production using resources which have a finite, limited supply. There is also growing evidence that the extraction of these resources across the globe could be especially damaging to biodiversity. Some of these metals, such as copper, cobalt, or rare earths, are so limited that they are a barrier to a Green New Deal-type plan. And as these metals deplete, the energy return of renewable technologies will continually fall in the future, as the energy used in their extraction increases. Even if we innovate, such as swapping lithium with sodium in batteries, trace amounts of rare earths and other metals are still required, and the yet-to-be-invented nanotechnologies proposed as substitutes have an uncertain efficiency or efficacy. How, then, can groups promoting the Green New Deal, such as zero carbon Britain, advocate 100% renewable energy without also advising of the resource or pollution risks inherent in that project? The reason, from my own experience, arguing with zero carbon Britain for over a decade is that they just ignore them. They ignore them because the people in power, like the Climate Change Committee, don't want to hear them, and so they exclude them from their considerations. What is certain is that while a segment of the globally affluent may be able to scrape a carbon-free lifestyle, there are not sufficient resources to allow everyone else on the planet to consume in that way, and the overriding reliance on a single metric to judge progress. Carbon emissions is leading to a willing ignorance over both the global pollution, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss that would result from such a green future. As people have demanded my opinion on this recently, do I think that George Monbiot is being funded by corporate interest to talk about precision fermentation? I really don't think that matters at all. Whether he's being funded or not doesn't change the underlying technical arguments, and to raise that as an issue distracts from the evidence for why he is wrong. Motive is not the issue here, the issue here is evidence. Let's address the big issue first. Technically, there is no food production crisis. As George commented in his interview with Owen Jones, world hunger is rising, now probably extending to a billion people or more, including in the most affluent states. That last part is a critical issue. The reason people in affluent states skip meals is the same reason as those in poor states die of malnutrition. It's an issue of allocation, not production. The reasons for world hunger and malnutrition in both poor and rich states, depending upon the location, are variously the result of economic inequality, climate change, conflict or displacement, natural disasters, urbanization and or isolation from the land, restricting access to food except by payment, poor diet due to the economic or social barriers to accessing good quality food and social or state imposed barriers restricting access to land or food by certain groups. Precision fermentation is the idea that by using genetically engineered microorganisms grown inside industrial vats, protein can be produced far more efficiently and with secondary processing and chemical additives, those simple proteins can be engineered into nutritious meat substitutes. Given that brief summary, does anything stated there address the points in the list of reasons behind global hunger? No. To even talk about precision fermentation in the same context as hunger belittles the global inequalities that drive it and distracts from the necessary changes to national and global governance in order to change those outcomes. The root of global hunger is inequality. Global inequality is not the fault of those who are hungry, it is due to the choices of those running the national and global governance systems. That system is dominated by a globally affluent elite, where the 10% of the world's population benefiting from that mechanism consume half of everything, while the bottom half consume just 10%. Let's be absolutely clear on this. There is a human right to food. The fact hundreds of millions are hungry, yet enough food is produced for all is a matter of political choice, not fate. I've read George Monbiot's book, Regenesis. Personally, I've found his recent books rather rambling. Lamenting the ills of the world, yet ignoring the radical solutions available if he could only remove his mental shackles to society as it is. We need to stop worrying about how bad things are and concentrate on the simplest ways to make them better. For example, in chapter five he says, City farms, allotments and guerrilla gardens help us to feel a sense of connection to the land and engage our minds and hands in satisfying work. But with one or two exceptions, it's unlikely to satisfy more than a tiny fraction of demand. The reasons should be obvious. Land in cities is scarce and expensive. Why is land in cities expensive? Because it is owned by a minute minority of the population called landlords. Why is that an ecological issue? Climate change is a physical restriction on humanity. How much food you can grow on a square metre of soil is also a physical restriction. In contrast, property rights are made up in the minds of humans. They don't exist just like the monetary values they are traded with. They are not a physical restriction. If we are truly saying that climate change and ecological breakdown are existential, that society lives or dies by what we do in the next decade, who could support a wholly abstract division of the land in a way which prevents people from providing their needs in the most low-impact way. Once again, we come back to the issue of inequality. In Britain, less than 1% of the population own half the land. In the Genesis, George argues that the intellectual property rights on the solutions to climate change must be weakened. Why then can't we also restrict property rights on the land, or cap land values, or tax wealth, to facilitate low-impact lifestyles? George attacked the film Planet of the Humans because of its alleged promotion of population control. In a short film based on the Genesis, George opens with the statement, People say we have a population crisis, and we do, but it's not us, it's them. Farmed animals are now increasing in number about twice as fast as human beings. Apparently, it's okay to be speciesist, but not racist. He may have said this ironically, but the issues surrounding animal agriculture are far more complex than this, and to dismiss that complexity for a simplistic technological pipe dream makes no sense. He then proceeds to market his main idea. Now, in Helsinki, Finland, scientists are brewing up an entirely different kind of food. Inside these tanks, protein is being produced by bacteria. The only inputs are water, carbon from the air, a sprinkling of nutrients, and electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the only waste product is water. Earlier, I mentioned the problems of the Green New Deal, and the barriers to expanding renewable energy to replace fossil fuels. By advocating the use of electricity to produce protein, perhaps 25 times more energy per unit of protein produced, it necessarily involves a certain level of minerals extraction, a certain level of pollution, and a certain level of biodiversity loss as a result of those operations. Are any of those impacts factors into George's presentation of the process? No. Finland is a good example. While a quart of their electricity comes from hydro and wind, her and the same comes from nuclear, and that is projected to rise as their new, delayed, and massively over budget European pressurized water reactor comes online. Does the fermentation process therefore consume uranium and produce high-level nuclear waste? Arguably, yes. Is that considered in George's model? No. I don't want to labour the point, but this model of how the process works is highly misleading. It doesn't measure all the related impacts of creating the electricity, or extracting and purifying the artificial nutrients, or the associated energy and pollution costs of processing the protein gloop into cultured meat. It's very much like the nuclear industry's argument that nuclear power doesn't emit carbon dioxide, and yet from the concrete in the reactor to the ore processing at the uranium mine, greenhouse gases are embodied throughout that process. In affluent states, the major source of protein is meat, but in poor states, the major source of protein is vegetables and cereals. How does that square with George's assumption that meat production for the global population is a homogeneous issue? Humans need roughly 50 to 60 grams of protein per day. On average, most countries scrape that amount in their national diet, but in the affluent world, people on average consume at least twice that amount or more. Does George discuss the inequality of global protein intakes, and how that too leads to damaging health impacts, just as too little protein does? Not that I can find. Turning to George's recent column in The Guardian, we see the same simplistic narrow boundary analysis applied as justification. The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein, soy, grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means, beef and lamb production. According to both his book and his column then, the choices between intensive animal agriculture, intensive soy production, or precision fermentation. That's an entirely false dilemma, ignoring the large body of evidence on the viable alternative options. His book Regenesis doesn't discuss permaculture or integrated polyculture. Even their recent research shows those systems to be far less polluting, and as much, if not more productive, than the intensive farming system that he rails against. Even urban allotments, which he dismisses in the book, are as good as, if not more productive than intensive agriculture, with high levels of biodiversity. If we know there are easily implementable systems that can produce the same, if not more food, with less impacts, why doesn't Georgie evaluate those other options? Why doesn't he investigate the details behind why a third of the world's food is grown by small farmers using only a quarter of the farm's land area, hence a third more productive than intensive agriculture? And how does this characterisation of the problem of protein production fit the varied models of small-scale agriculture or indigenous animal herders or hunters who do not practise intensive production? These alternatives are dismissed without investigation. Interviewed by Aaron Bestani, the man who wrote the book on fully automated luxury communism, one hour in, George states, By doing it this way, you can localise your food production, and it can be much cheaper. You're not paying soft currencies for hard currencies. You're not using your local currency to buy stuff on the dollar market. You're producing your own food locally, and it could have a massive impact in reducing hunger, but also in allowing people to assert sovereignty over their own food supply. Those points apply even more strongly to locally-based agriculture or small-scale production on plots or urban allotments than to precision fermentation. Consider the upfront demand for electricity, water, concentrated nutrients, and a processing capacity to turn the protein gloop into an appetising foodstuff. Are those factors which are all locally available? Clearly not. Even locally produced solar electricity requires photovoltaic panels, which are the product of a globalised mining, manufacturing and logistics chain that operates on the hard dollar currencies he's being critical of. George's analysis of the land required to support cultured meat is incomplete. It doesn't include the land take of the system's externalities, such as power generation, nutrient production, or the landmine for metal or phosphate resources. Unless that essential part of the system is included, he is not making a like-for-like comparison, and so no claims can be made as to its advantage. In contrast, what the localised permaculture or integrated polyculture systems depend on? Seeds. Literally the most complex part of a local food system is developing the right seed varieties for the local climatic conditions, and once obtained, they can be simply grown and shared, no hard currencies or mechanised logistics chains required. Small-scale animal agriculture, integrated into fodder cover and nutrient cycling, may be part of that process, especially at high latitudes where the growing season is shorter. That, again, is something that requires a local assessment of the best option for food production. But to reduce this entire debate to technology will save us, is simplistic, illogical, and not based upon evidence. I have wrestled with virginuses since I've read it. His recent Guardian columns only add to my concern about his public pronouncements. I can rationalise their flaws and failures in only one way. The levels of compromise George Monbiot engages in to maintain his position within the media environment mean that he can no longer represent ecological reality to his audience. Multilevel marketing, created off the back of the social media boom, is as revolutionary as the fears raised by Vance Packard about the marketing boom in the 1950s. Whether by direct payment, goods in kind, or just because of the group identity it confers, the manipulation of social influencers by political, financial and industrial interests represents a new world west in, to use Edward Bernays' famous phrase, the engineering of consent. George Monbiot is such an influencer and a valued one, as his audience is largely made up of the affluent middle class with disposable incomes. And in the marketing of that message, unlike other advertisers, he is wholly unaccountable as he accentuates the positive and buries the bad news. Although Johnathan Pirate may have felt either the honesty or the entitlement to state the assumptions behind the eco-modernist viewpoint, many do not. They bend and twist their ideas to avoid ever confronting reality, that their technocratic machinations are devised to maintain their material entitlements. Eco-modernism can never address the economic and social inequalities which benefit the globally affluent while creating suffering or hunger for other living beings, humans included. Just like the establishment's failure to address colonialism, doing so would question their own political and economic advantage in the here and now, raising difficult questions of justice and accountability for past policies. When I raised the issue of class identity, affluence and the ecological crisis, a number of people in the environment movement, especially of the eco-modernist persuasion, are driven to apoplexy. I understand that. It challenges the very basis of their self-identity and hence their security and well-being. But it's equally valid to require anyone objecting to this approach to view the issue from the opposite side, from the majority who are economically excluded from the debate, and why the low-tech, low-impact options for change are excluded from that debate as the privileged pundits leading it feel uncomfortable talking about them. Through his columns in The Guardian in his recent book, George Mambio has created talking points that seek an ecologically benign stasis in the human system, ignoring the needs and current predicament of the nationally and globally poor. To even mention the word hunger in the context of precision fermentation, I find offensive. To talk of technocratic solutions that are reliant upon globalised commodity systems, when the barriers to access and food are the result of the neocolonial domination of world resource production, I find repugnant. What I have not raised here is George's Reboot Food Initiative, and in particular his manifesto, including calls to legalised gene editing, without specifying which of the many processes available should be made legal, calls to rewilding, without specifying what that means and to what extent rewilding people is permitted, and calls for greater food labelling, which presumes the perpetuation of a highly centralised industrial food production and distribution system. That manifesto deserves a deep dive of its own. If eco-modernism is focused on enabling certain technological or consumer choices, when many are excluded from those choices, not simply by price, but by the fact they can barely scrape the basics for a viable lifestyle, then how is that debate ever going to create a mass movement for change? Worse still, the political right that George seems so afraid of will weaponise that failure to engage across the social spectrum, to obstruct change, and to alienate those making such arguments. George Mombio has a highly privileged position, which he could use positively. He could deconstruct the economic and social processes that created his privilege, and through that process, both advocate for radical ecological change and build bridges with those economically excluded from the advantage that he has benefited from. He chooses not to do that. Instead, he advocates for solutions which preserve the economic advantage of the Western lifestyle above any criticism that it is physically and practically beyond salvage. We must revivify the radicalism that parrots are nervous excluded from the movement in the 1980s as they sought compromise with the establishment and reinvigorate the deep ecological debate on materialism and inequality that has been suppressed for too long. We need seeds, not solenoids, plots, not vats, gardens, not economic globalisation. Above all, we need land rights and access to land, to disengage in the global economic system that is the root of human exploitation and ecological destruction. For a catchy sound bite to encompass that, let's say we need to re-wild the people alongside all the other animals. As I have reviewed here, George Monbiot's representation of ecological issues in the media has become increasingly narrow, biased towards the perpetuation of affluence and establishment power, and as a result, he is apparently twisting, misquoting or stating incomplete information in order to maintain that position. What he promotes is an extreme centrism which, through highly questionable technocratic schemes, seeks to preserve the entitlements of affluence against the inevitable crash of that lifestyle. As a result, he is sanitising ecological destruction and global inequality to maintain the artificial lifestyle of the affluent minority who have benefited the most from industrialisation, which, in the end, is what has created the ecological crisis, and which must be curtailed to advert it.