George Monbiot

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Toby Butler: So would you perhaps just from the beginning, just tell me about your first experience or involvement with XR and how it worked.George Monbiot: So, so I, I’d heard that people were organising this thing called Extinction Rebellion. And even the name sounded very exciting to me. I thought this is what we need, this sounds, this sounds great. And so I went along to their first open meeting at which they’d invited journalists. And there were just a couple of us journalists and I was, so as always unsure whether I was really there as a journalist or as a campaigner but I don’t see, I don’t see there being a hard and fast division between them. I’m a campaigning journalist. I try to be empirical but I know what I want and I know what I’m trying to achieve. And I found it thrilling. I, I thought finally people are talking about responses which are commensurate with the scale of the problem. Because so often, and this is one of the huge failings of environmentalism, we talk about the vast scale of the problem and then we propose responses which are in no way matched to it. So earth’s systems are failing, so recycle your bottle tops. The global heating is going to, is going to destroy civilisation, so don’t use plastic cotton buds, use cardboard ones instead. It’s pathetic a lot of it. It’s what I call micro-consumerist bollocks. And it’s one of the reasons why it’s been so hard to get traction because if people feel that your solutions are so tiny, the problem can’t be so big. They can’t take us seriously if we are proposing these tiny and pathetic solutions. And it’s only when they see mass mobilisation and when they see people prepared to sacrifice their liberty that they begin to take a movement seriously. And this is what XR was proposing on a large scale. And I think, I think the theory was right. And for a while we, you know, and I got involved to some extent with XR, for a while we were making some headway. And then the repressive backlash was beyond anything we could have expected. Particularly the ’22 Police Act and the ’23 Public Order Act, they were just off the scale. I mean this was- I don’t think there has been a broadly democratic modern nation which has entertained any such legislation, certainly not in my lifetime before, where you just effectively banned any form of public dissent or protest with enormous jail sentences. I mean far longer jail sentences than most people get for sexual assault or for violent crime. Just literally in some cases for walking down the street. And that has made organising extremely difficult. And then there’s also the use of process as punishment. These, all this ancillary stuff like the use of electronic tags and extremely restrictive, extreme movement restrictions and behaviour restrictions associated with them. The use of private injunctions following up on public prosecutions. I mean there are so many ways in which they can make life absolute hell for dissenters now. It’s beginning to feel quite totalitarian. The scope for registering your disapproval in a way that can count politically has been reduced to almost zero in this country. And you know we are on our own. There’s a very strong sense of being on our own, you know. There’s no, you know, again outside The Guardian and one or two much smaller outlets, there’s really no pushback against this highly repressive legislation. And, and there’s no support for the people who are trying defend earth’s systems against rampant destruction.British Library catalogue number: C2037/84 Project clip number: 239