Monbiot meets the eco fascists


The purpose of this page is to reveal  Monbiot's  ultra conservative, deep ecology, anti progress, some might argue eco fascist  philosophy through his writing and connection to others.

 One such connection is to Paul Kingsnorth and his Dark Mountain organisation at whose conference Monbiot was interviewed in front of an audience.

Ivy League (Dartmouth College) professor of environmental  studies, Michael K. Dorsey referred to  Dark Mountain in the following way in the Guardian.

'Everyone should stay vigilant and keep their danger sniffers on full alert when the likes of those high on the Dark Mountain and others associated with "deep ecological" tendencies get on about "crises" of "humanity." Sadly, we have a great deal of evidence now, that such 'dark' tendencies have been built upon a legacy of misanthropic meandering, petty eco-fascism and immigrant bashing-- souped up in talk of waywardness from the "myth[s] of human centrality"--by the likes of Teddy Goldsmith, the gaggle of old Ecologist sods, inter alia, some of whom helped precipitate the Cornerhouse'.

http://discussion.guardian.co.uk/comment-permalink/5160452

Dr. M. K. Dorsey is a professor in Dartmouth College’s Environmental Studies Program and the Director of the College’s Climate Justice Research Project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_K._Dorsey 

https://id.guardian.co.uk/profile/drmkd/public

Here Monbiot  refers to himself as an anarcho-primitivist  : 

GEORGE MONBIOT: LET'S "REWILD" THE BRITISH ISLES

My approach differs in this respect from that of some anarcho-primitivists, who imagine a time in which people in industrialised nations might return to hunting and gathering. You need only discover that the maximum population of Britain during the Mesolithic (the last period in which we lived only by those means) appears to have been around 5,000 to see what this would entail. For me, rewilding is not about abandoning civilisation but enhancing it.

http://www.bigissue.com/features/interviews/2415/george-monbiot-lets-rewild-british-isles

from Wikipedia

Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification,coercion, and alienation. Anarcho-primitivists advocate a return to non-"civilized" ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of the division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization technologies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism


This is an article from Monbiot's  website, a manifesto of anarcho-primitivism . The reference to  'dangerous notion of progress' goes to the heart of ultra conservative deep ecology. 'Dangerous' is an extreme word to describe the achievements of civilisation. It fits perfectly with the  concept of  anarcho-primitivism 


Progress is dangerous

The peculiarities of the Abrahamic religions - their astonishing success in colonising the world and their dangerous notion of progress (now inherited by secular society) - result from a marriage between the universal god of the nomads and the conditions which permitted cities to develop. The dominant beliefs of the past 2000 years are the result of an ancient migration from soils such as xerepts and xeralfs to soils such as fluvents and rendolls.

At Easter, the Christian belief in a permanent resurrection is mixed up with the pagan belief in a perpetual cycle of temporary resurrection and death. In church we worship the Christian notion of progress, which has now filtered into every aspect of our lives. But, amid the cracking of easter eggs and the murmur of prayer, there can still be heard the small, faint voice which reminds us that our ecological hubris must eventually be greeted by nemesis.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/03/22/god-of-the-soil/

Genesis 1:28

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”


This is Monbiot's very similar refutation of  the  book of  Genesis. Echoing what  Professor Dorsey said about human centrality.

(Science) shows us that humankind is not the purpose and pivot of the Universe, that Man has not been cast in the image of God to control the rest of creation. Science teaches us humility. It tells us that we emerge from the natural world, and remain subject to its laws and limitations. Only through the demolition of creation myths can an ecological worldview be sustained.

http://www.monbiot.com/2000/05/25/god-versus-greens/


* Monbiot uses the phrase 'Abrahamic religions', however the only the only Abrahamic religion that existed at the time the article refers to, was Judaism. The world's first transcandental monotheistic religion that  constrasts with  cyclic, nature based paganism.

There is  no need to invoke Godwin's law because there is no attempt to associate Mr Monbiot with direct racism or anti semitism. Like his exteme right 'deep ecology' colleagues, the Goldsmith family,  Monbiot claims Jewish ancestry.



Plus

Rewilding, Monbiot promises, "is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way". There is a certain smug hands-off paternalism to this image, as though the rewilder is watching from a safe distance while nature, like an adorable little child, wanders off haltingly on its own path. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/06/nature-writing-revival


Jared Diamond

 Jared Diamond, in the article "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race",  said that hunter-gatherers practice the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history, in contrast with agriculture which he described as a "mess" that has tumbled us, and it’s "unclear whether we can solve it".


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism




“One of our tendencies,” Monbiot told Sunday Edition guest host Laura Lynch, “is to try to manage and control and see ourselves as stewards of the land, and to take an Old Testament view of dominion that we’re responsible for all the animals and plants. Well, nature did pretty well for the three billion years before we turned up, and it could do pretty well again if we learned to interfere less.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/08/02/f-sunday-edition-george-monbiot-environment.html#



Here is another statement of  basic philosophy. emphasising a refutation of  human centrality.

Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism




Monbiot and the Dark Mountain

Dougald Hine interviewed George Monbiot at the Dark Mountain Uncivilisation conference, 2010

He introduces the interview by expressing his gratitude  that Monbiot has done as much as anyone else to spread the word about the Dark Mountain .  The manifesto is partly as follows

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

There is  no argument Monbiot himself rejects the idea that  the collapse of industrial civilisation is inevitable and nothing  can be done, on the contrary,  he believes in engaging the destruction of industrial civilsation.

However he also says "I am very sympathetic to a lot of the things Paul said today"


http://archive.org/details/MonbiotHineUncivilisation2010


Monbiot is positively exaltant  about Kingsnorth's essay.

Paul Kingsnorth co-founded the Dark Mountain project as a means of exploring this problem. His latest essay The Quants and the Poets is a compelling and beautifully-written account of the way in which “the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers” and is now trying to save the world “one emission at a time.” Trying to accommodate a narrative of other people’s making, greens “feel obliged to act like speak-your-weight machines just to be heard.” This approach, he argues, “has left environmentalism in a position where its advocates now find themselves unable to do anything but argue about which machines they would prefer to use to power an ever-growing industrial economy.”

He explains his prescription as follows:

“What is missing here is stories, and an understanding of the importance of stories in getting to the bottom of what is really going on. Because at root, this whole squabble between worldviews is not about numbers at all – it is about narratives. … How to reassert the importance of stories, then, is perhaps a key question now. Green poets might perhaps start by observing that worlds are not ’saved’ by the same stories that are killing them. They might want to observe that saving worlds is an impossible business in the first place, and that attempting to do so is likely to lead to some very dark places. Or they might try and explore what it is about how we see ourselves which reduces us to this, time and time again – arguing about machines rather than wondering what those machines give us and what they take away.”

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/05/05/our-crushing-dilemmas/


Keith Farnish  is a prominent member of the Dark Mountain network.
http://uncivilisation.ning.com/profile/KeithFarnish



Farnish wrote a book called   'Time's Up!: An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis '. In it he writes '  The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization

and

Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage'

The book was endorsed  by the world's leading scientist James Hansen who gave evidence at the trial of the activists who damaged Kingsnorth power station.


In an almost identical vein,  showing that unlike Paul Kingsnorth, he believes in taking terrorist style action, like  Keith Farnish.


George Monbiot endorsed the actions of protesters who sabotaged Scottish mine equipment and encouraged future similar action.

But while the government undermines its own targets, some people in Scotland are putting its climate change policy into effect. The Scottish camp for climate action has declared war on opencast coal mining. Yesterday people associated with it did what the government should have done years ago, and cut the conveyor belt used to carry coal from the Glentaggart pit in Lanarkshire to the local rail terminal. Now they propose to take on other pits, as well as Scotland's biggest coal-burning power stations. They have chosen the right targets. Coal is the dirty word that threatens to destroy attempts at Copenhagen in December to prevent climate breakdown. If governments won't take it on, we must.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/aug/07/monbiot-scotland-climate-policy


Paul Kingsnorth's homage to his former employer and mentor  Edward Goldsmith

I was very sad to hear last week of the death of Teddy Goldsmith, one of this country's pioneering greens, and a man I knew personally and worked with for a time. It was Teddy who gave me my break at the Ecologist; a break which eventually led to me becoming its deputy editor in the days when it was still a magazine and not (shiver) a website.

Teddy Goldsmith was a curious paradox of a man. Very rich, very establishment, yet also fiercely anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-modern. A pioneer of environmental campaigning, Teddy was making the case against global capitalism before I was even born, and countering its global spread with a vision of his own: a romantic, conservative vision of small communities living 'stable' lives close to the soil.

http://paulkingsnorth.net/blog/edward-goldsmith-1928---2009/


Monbiot does forecast collapse here.

We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/02/environmental-fixes-all-greens-lost#

Here Monbiot chides his fellow deep ecologist Edward Goldsmith (mentor and employer of his friend  Paul Kingsnorth) for his explicit  statement of one of its fundamental principles, the separation of  races (back to nature). It is consistent with deep ecologists opposition to  globalisation and its support for tribal societies. The article does reveal the connection between environmetalism and extreme right wing organisations.

Black Shirts in Green Trousers

By George Monbiot, April 30, 2002

The far right is moving in, and greens and globalisation campaigners must do more to shut it out.

The BNP is not the only force on the far right which now describes itself as “the true green party”. Similar claims have been made by members of Le Pen’s Front National, by the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and, in Britain, by a tiny offshoot of the National Front which calls itself Third Way. This is the group which most clearly articulates the way in which the politics of the hard right are shifting.

The previous editorial team split with its founder Teddy Goldsmith after he addressed a meeting of the hard right Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeene. Goldsmith, whose politics are a curious mixture of radical and reactionary, has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute “distinct ethnic groups” and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/04/30/black-shirts-in-green-trousers


Two years later, he (Monbiot) had published Poisoned Arrows, an investigative travel book about the threatened tribes of Indonesia; Amazon Watershed, which exposed the massacre and land dispossessions of thousands of Amazonian peasants, followed shortly. This month, No Man's Land, which charts the destruction of the pastoral nomads of Kenya and Tanzania, is published in paperback by Picador.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/enter-the-cleanshaven-adventurer-hero-1618791.html


Desperate Lucan dreamt of fascist coup

Murder mystery earl bought Mein Kampf and listened to Hitler's speeches

There is no suggestion Lucan was in any way anti-Semitic or supported the Final Solution. But he and his associates, who included casino owner and party host John Aspinall, and the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, were increasingly convinced Britain had fallen victim to a socialist conspiracy. Daily Express journalist Charles Benson, one of Lucan's friends, said: 'He was very right wing and never watered it down in front of liberals. He would talk about hanging and flogging and niggers to get a reaction.'

According to former MI5 officer Peter Wright, a group of his colleagues, including Margaret Thatcher's mentor Airey Neave, began discussing a political coup. According to Wright, they believed that the Labour government had been infiltrated by the KGB and should be overthrown. He also claimed they were backed by a right-wing financier. Goldsmith always denied he put the money behind the group or discussed MI5 matters with former intelligence officers.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jan/09/politics.past



De-evolution (Monbiot).

The idea of resurrecting woolly mammoths fires the imagination on all cylinders. Last week interest in this marvellous notion was reignited by Professor Ian Wilmut,  the man who cloned Dolly the sheep, ruminated about how it might be done. The answer, in brief, is that it pushes at the very limits of plausibility, but there's a tiny chance that, within 50 years or so, it could just happen.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/06/resurrecting-woolly-mammoths-exciting-but-fantasy?CMP=twt_fd

Monbiot references his favourite Nazi animal (the aurochs) in a grandiose warrior flourish

I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people's interests forbid us to live.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/14/climate-change-battle-redefine-humanity


Nazi 'super cows' shipped to Devon farm

The "Heck" cattle were designed by brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck in an attempt to recreate the extinct European wild ox, the aurochs, an important beast in German mythology.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/apr/21/super-cows-wild-ox


'Nazi' cattle being bred in UK

A Devon farmer has succeeded in introducing a breed of cattle that has not been seen in the UK for over 4,000 years. During the Second World War, the Heck cow was a symbol of Nazi ambitions to rule the world.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8019029.stm




'The Lake District is a wildlife desert. Blame Wordsworth I revere Wordsworth the poet, but not his view of farming as a benign force. The Lakes fells don't need world heritage status – just fewer sheep... I see it as one of the most depressing landscapes in Europe. It competes with the chemical deserts of East Anglia for the title of Britain's worst-kept countryside. The celebrated fells have been thoroughly sheepwrecked http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/lake-district-wildlife-desert-blame-wordsworth You have to admire a man who invents his own words because English just isn't good enough..

Farming has done more extensive damage to wildlife and habitats than all the factories ever built. Few kinds of farming have done more harm in proportion to their output than the keeping of sheep in the hills.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/lake-district-wildlife-desert-blame-wordsworth

Click here  for a more comprehensive  page on eco fascism.