George Monbiot

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:So I was starkly aware even then of the loss that the natural world was suffering. And I became an environmentalist without even knowing what an environmentalist was. I had been, what I asked for for my third birthday present was a subscription to Animals Magazine which later became Wildlife Magazine and later became BBC Wildlife Magazine. And there was just the occasional article in it and I was a very prolific reader even as a small kid. Occasional article about some of the harmful things which were happening to the natural world. And these things really hit me hard. I felt the grief of it even then. And then when I was about eight years old I was playing on the common by myself, I’d often be with my friends and we’d have our rival gangs and our camps and we’d destroy our rivals camps and all that. But often also by myself not feeling at all lonely just enjoying being immersed in nature. And one day I was watching this green woodpecker’s nest in an old hollow cherry tree. And there were quite a lot of these cherry trees because wild cherry is a pioneer species which- And there were parts of the common which had already been forested naturally, regenerating forest, woodland had come in a few decades before. And now the first of those trees, particularly the old cherry trees which had been quite a dominant species were beginning to die off. And cherries die off in a very interesting way in that they’re very prone to becoming hollow because the most resilient part of the tree is the bark. Very different to quite a few other tree species. And then they make brilliant habitat for a whole series of other creatures. There’s an old ecologist’s maxim that there’s more life in a dead tree than in a living one. And this particular cherry tree, year after year had hosted this, a family of green woodpeckers. And it was a wonderful thing to watch because you could sit quite close without disturbing them and see all the baby green woodpeckers sticking their heads out of the hole while the adults came backwards and forwards feeding them. And one day I was doing that and this man turned up with a chainsaw. Now I knew this guy, I’d often seen him on the common. And he had rights of Estovers, which means he had the right to take dead wood. And I don’t know how the rule stood in those days. I don’t know if there was a closed season for cutting trees or not. But whether or not there was he was going to cut that cherry tree down. He had come for that specific purpose to cut that tree down woodpecker nest or not. And I, I was just outraged. I couldn’t believe that someone could even think of doing such a thing. And I tried to reason with him and he just thought I was mad. He, you know, it was a complete dialogue of the deaf because yes, I couldn’t see how he could not understand what was valuable about a green woodpecker’s nest and all the other things that that tree was supporting. And he could not understand how I could see a dead tree as anything other than a dead tree, just a stock of firewood. And that’s what he traded in, he traded firewood. And so without recognising that there is any precedent for this [laughing] and I was by no means the first person to do it, I climbed onto that tree, I was a tree hugger from the age of eight. And it was a total standoff until, and this was my Achilles heel, I realised that the clock was ticking and there was one rule that I had, you know, my parents let me wander out all day at that age with one proviso which was that I came back for lunch and I would be punished if I didn’t come back for lunch. And I could- There is a standoff which lasted about two hours and then I just knew I had to go home. And so I said to him, ‘Right you’re not to touch this tree while I go back for lunch.’British Library catalogue number: C2037/84 Project clip number: 11