About George

I had an unhappy time at university, and I now regret having gone to Oxford, even though the zoology course I took – taught, among others, by Richard Dawkins, Bill Hamilton and John Krebs – was excellent. The culture did not suit me, and when I tried to join in I fell flat on my face, sometimes in a drunken stupor. I enjoyed the holidays more: I worked on farms and as a waterkeeper on the River Kennet. I spent much of the last two years planning my escape. There was only one job I wanted, and it did not yet exist: to make investigative environmental programmes for the BBC.

After hammering on its doors for a year, I received a phone call from the head of the BBC’s natural history unit during my final exams. He told me: “you’re so fucking persistent you’ve got the job.” They took me on, in 1985, as a radio producer, to make wildlife programmes. Thanks to a supportive boss, I was soon able to make the programmes I wanted to produce. We broke some major stories. Our documentary on the sinking of a bulk carrier off the coast of Cork, uncovering evidence that suggested it had been deliberately scuppered, won a Sony award.

Just as it began to work out as I’d hoped, Margaret Thatcher and Marmaduke Hussey launched their attack on the independence of the BBC. They forced the resignation of the director-general, Alasdair Milne, in January 1987, and this brave, dynamic organisation became a cow’rin, tim’rous beastie almost overnight. A few weeks later my boss told me that it was all over: we would no longer be making investigative programmes.

I moved to the World Service, to work as a current affairs producer, but I was already planning to leave the BBC. While I was working for the natural history unit, I had come across the story of Suharto’s transmigration programme in Indonesia. Backed by the World Bank and Western governments, he was moving hundreds of thousands of people from the inner islands to the outer islands, with terrible consequences for both the migrants and the indigenous people in whose lands they were dumped. I had wanted to make a series about it: instead I took the idea to Penguin and persuaded them to give me the money to write a book. Towards the end of 1987 I travelled to Indonesia with the photographer Adrian Arbib. After forging a travel pass, we spent the next six months in West Papua.

We were as reckless and foolish as only young men can be – this is why wars get fought. We threw ourselves into and out of a great deal of trouble. At one point we had to walk and canoe for four weeks from the central highlands to the south coast. We became lost in the forest for several days and ate insects and rats to stay alive. I was stung almost to death by hornets. We also had some close brushes with the occupying Indonesian army. The story we uncovered – and our adventures along the way – are related in my first book Poisoned Arrows.

It did quite well, earning me enough of an advance on the next book to live in the Amazon for two years. I was 26 when I arrived in Brazil (in 1989), but I see this period as the beginning of my education. It was there that I had my first contact with extensive social movements: the resistance networks established by peasants and indigenous people defending their land from the people trying to seize it. I became closely involved with a peasant movement in Maranhão, which led to a beating by gunmen working with the military police.

I then followed the evicted peasants across the Amazon to the gold mines of Roraima, where I saw the devastating impacts of their attempts at survival, on both the forests and the Yanomami people. Masquerading as a shipping agent, I traced mahogany being stolen from indigenous and biological reserves to Britain for the first time: in one case to the furniture restoration department at Buckingham Palace.

The story of these investigations is told in my book Amazon Watershed, and in a film for the BBC made by the director Gerry Pomeroy. I returned to Brazil a few years later, to make a Radio 4 programme called Going Back, during which I managed to track down the police sergeant responsible for torturing and killing peasant activists in Maranhão. The episode was used for several years on the BBC’s health and safety training course as an example of what not to do.

Working once more with Adrian Arbib, I then moved to East Africa, in 1992, to investigate assaults on the lives of the nomadic peoples of Kenya and Tanzania. Living with the Turkana people in northern Kenya, I contracted cerebral malaria, failed to recognise it and very nearly died in Lodwar district hospital. The experience was a shattering one. During my recovery, I suffered, as cerebral malaria patients often do, from psychosis for several days. It was the most frightening time of my life. It took me some months to get my health back, and more than a year to regain my confidence. The episode cast a shadow over the rest of my work there, and for several years I was unable to talk or write about it. The story we uncovered is told in my book No Man’s Land.

After six years working in the tropics, I decided to return to Britain. There I became involved in the direct action movement: first against timber companies importing mahogany from the Amazon, then against the government’s road-building programme. In the summer of 1994, while contesting the road being built through the flank of Solsbury Hill, I was hospitalised by two thugs in yellow tabards, who impaled my foot on a fencing spike, smashing the middle bone. I was one of 11 people admitted to accident and emergency in the local hospital that day as a result of beatings by the security guards.

I saw the road-building programme as an example of the kind of enclosure the peasant movements in Brazil were fighting. Reading histories of land alienation and resistance movements in Britain, I began to see that these forces had played a major role in our politics, but were now largely forgotten. I co-founded a group called The Land is Ours, whose purpose was to try to revitalise public engagement in decisions about how the land is used. We occupied a number of sites, including 13 acres of prime real estate beside Wandsworth Bridge in London, which was destined for yet another supermarket. We held it for six months, beating the owners, Guinness, in court, and built a village there, which was eventually destroyed in the eviction.

In 1995, I received a UN Global 500 Award, given to me by Nelson Mandela.

After writing a few op-eds for the Guardian, I was offered a regular column in 1996. I’ve been writing it ever since. Thanks to the tolerant and open-minded editors I have been blessed with ever since, I have been able to explore the issues that interest me, however obscure they may be. I cannot think of any work I would rather do, except perhaps tracking wolves, but there’s not much call for that in Britain.

As a result of some of the things I learnt while researching my columns, I began the investigations which culminated in my next book, Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain, published in 2000. The discoveries it made, I felt, shone new light on politics in this country. But while the books I had written about other countries were reviewed in most of the papers, Captive State was reviewed hardly anywhere, at least when it was first published. The deathly silence with which the book was received suggested to me that some issues are treated by the media as too impolite to discuss.

After identifying what I felt were some of the problems curtailing democratic politics, I set out to propose some solutions, in my next book, The Age of Consent. Like Captive State, this sold well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been little progress towards the solutions it proposed.

In 2004, horrified by the Iraq War, and disgusted that a Labour government had dragged us into it, I co-founded an organisation called Respect. Its initial purpose was to build a coalition of left and green parties, to create a more effective challenge to the political duopoly that then dominated the UK. Not everyone had the same idea, however. When Respect began standing candidates against existing alternative parties, and George Galloway moved in, I moved out.

Since then I have published several more books, including two collections of essays (Bring on the Apocalypse and How Did We Get into this Mess?); Heat: how to stop the planet burning, which shows how we can cut carbon emissions by 90% without destroying our quality of life; and Feral: searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding, the book I have enjoyed writing more than any other.

One of the outcomes of Feral was the charity Rewilding Britain, that I helped to found. It’s been amazing to witness the traction that rewilding has begun to gain in this country: I hope to see big changes within my lifetime.

I gave a TED talk on rewilding, part of which was turned by the film makers Sustainable Human into a short video, How Wolves Change Rivers. It has been watched 40 million times on YouTube. I’ve since made several other films with Sustainable Human, including How Whales Change Climate and There Is More Than One Kind Of Intelligence.

In 2016, I released an album I wrote with the remarkable musician Ewan McLennan, called Breaking the Spell of Loneliness. We have toured it around Britain, turning the gigs into parties that bring strangers into contact with each other. It worked out better than I could have imagined. The astonishing people we met and their willingness to take social risks have restored my faith in humankind, and point to possible solutions to some of our crises.

This experience helped inform my latest book: Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis, published in autumn 2017. It sketches a new political story, tailored to the needs of the 21st Century, to replace the failed models of the 20th, with which we are currently still stuck.

In 2018, I had major surgery for prostate cancer, which appears to have been successful.

In 2019, with a small team, I launched the Natural Climate Solutions campaign, calling for the mass restoration of living systems, partly to draw down carbon from the atmosphere on a vast scale. It has been extremely successful, helping to put the issue on the global map. Building on this campaign, I co-presented a short film called Nature Now with Greta Thunberg, directed by Tom Mustill. It has been watched over 60 million times on various platforms, and has won a wide range of prizes, including two Webbys.

I gave a second TED talk, called The new political story that could change everything.

I edited a report for the Labour Party, written with six land experts, called Land for the Many, proposing major changes in the way land in the UK is used, owned and governed. It triggered a massive reaction in the billionaire newspapers, some of which published blatant lies about its contents, but it helped bring some of the most neglected issues in politics to public attention.

In autumn 2019, I was arrested during an Extinction Rebellion protest. I was also one of seven claimants in the successful judicial review against the excessive use of police powers (under Section 14 of the 1986 Public Order Act) against XR.

In 2020, my film Apocalypse Cow, directed by Peter Gauvain, was broadcast by Channel 4. It generated a lively debate. I continued to make short political films with Double Down News, some of which have had millions of viewers. The BAFTA-winning director Alex Lockwood made a short film about my life in activism: Monbiot – Arresting the Truth.

In 2021, I presented the world’s first live investigative documentary, Rivercide, directed by Franny Armstrong. It was a crazy project, fraught with technical, logistical and journalistic risk. But somehow, thanks to a large and brilliant team, it worked.

I made my contemporary dance debut(!). I had a cameo role, kayak-dancing, in Feral, a magnificent work composed by Hollie Harding and choreographed by Josh Ben-Tovim, which was inspired by my book. Soon afterwards, recognising that my brief but glorious career had peaked, I announced my retirement from the medium. At the climate conference in Glasgow, I presented a series of films called Monbiosis, on a channel a group of us set up for the occasion, cop26.tv.

In 2022, my book Regenesis: feeding the world without devouring the planet was published. I worked with the Barbican on a project about soil ecology, as part of its Our Time on Earth exhibition. I gave a third TED talk: Can we feed ourselves without devouring the planet?

I was elected an honorary fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. I’m working with other members of the college, and people from other academic and commercial institutes, on a very interesting and potentially transformative scientific project. I also joined the advisory board of EAT, the scientific forum that seeks ways of transforming the global food system, both to improve human health and to defend the living world. I was very surprised to win the Orwell Prize for Journalism. I used the occasion to lambast the media for doing more harm to the living planet than the fossil fuel industry.

We moved to South Devon, where I feel I’m finally living in my ecological niche, especially when I’m in my sea kayak.

In 2023 I worked with the great US director Peter Hutchison on finishing our feature film and book: The Invisible Doctrine, both of which will be released in 2024. I was one of the founders of Fighting Dirty, a new legal campaign against pollution. We are currently sueing the UK government over the spreading of contaminated sewage sludge on farmland. I was elected an honorary fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

I wrote a long essay, The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People, that achieved more traction than any other I’ve published. I was allowed back on Question Time for the first time in over 20 years (someone dropped out the day before, and they urgently needed to fill the seat). Like Mick Lynch and others whose contributions went viral, I doubt I’ll be invited again: if you’re on the left, you’re not supposed to win.

In 2024, VPRO in the Netherlands broadcast a 90-minute interview about my life and ideas, in English, as part of its Wintergasten series.

I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping.