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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*
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.
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".
“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.”
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
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"
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
'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..
Farminghas
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.