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:And there was only one place I wanted to be and that was the BBC’s Natural History Unit. You know I wanted to be a journalist, I could see that I could do useful work there, you know. And I wanted to be a journalist whose work counted. I didn’t want to just report on things for the sake of it. I wanted to change things. I still felt what was happening to the natural world to be a great wound. I, I found it devastating, my awareness of, of the harm that was being done. And I wanted to change that. And I had, I mean I was very naïve, I, I had this mistaken belief that the problem was an information deficit, that if only people knew and understood what was happening, then automatically things would change. People would say, ‘We need to change’ and they would change. And I laboured under that delusion for quite a few years. But, and was slowly weaned off it by brutal experience. Anyway, the, I, I you know listened and watched the BBC’s outlet religiously. And I thought this, output, sorry, and I thought this, this is missing something, something very obvious, you know. There’s endless programmes about the natural world but almost nothing about what’s happening to it. And if there is anything about what’s happening to it, it’s very superficial. Where’s the investigative environmental journalism? And I had a very clear vision, and I’m sort of grateful to myself for seeing it so clearly, this is what’s missing, there is no investigative environmental journalism. So what I want to be is an investigative environmental journalist. And there’s only one place which I felt could support that and that was the BBC.British Library catalogue number: C2037/84 Project clip number: 63