Other


Comical asides



Monbiot’s metamorphosis - Brendan O'Neil


George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and predictor of the world’s end, has undergone a metamorphosis of Kafkaesque proportions in recent years. Never mind poor Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning to find himself transmogrified into a monstrous insect; Monbiot has made an even more remarkable cross-species leap. Some time during the past five years he went to bed an hysteric, the closest thing Britain had to a nutty Nostradamus, and awoke to find himself labelled a man of reason, a ‘defender of truth’ no less, who is praised on the dust-jacket of his latest book for possessing a ‘dazzling command of science’ (only by Naomi Klein, admittedly, but still).

How has this happened? How is it that Monbiot, who still writes the same old apocalyptic nonsense (think Book of Revelations but without the hot pokers or sex), can now pose – more than that, be hailed – as a scientific visionary? His metamorphosis from green-tinted despiser of all things modern to man with a dazzling command of science reveals a great deal about the politics of environmentalism, and how it has added a gloss of ‘scientific fact’ to long-standing middle-class prejudices against mass modern society.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5479/


Moonbat - Rod Lidel

You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. The unchallengeable certitude with which Monbiot treats his second favourite subject, and the viciousness with which he denounces anyone who disagrees, reminds me a little of the hardline creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains: there is no argument, we are not qualified to argue, man-made climate change simply IS, and let there be an end to the debate. It is this very certitude, and the response to critics, which makes me doubtful.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/rod-liddle/2009/09/moonbat/


AA Gill  Scepticism is on the menu

The real killer thing is the schadenfreude: the naked, transparent, hand-rubbing glee with which they pass on every shame, sadness and terror. No disaster is too appalling or imminent that the green movement can’t caper and keen with a messianic glee. Take George Monbiot, the Malvolio of the green movement, who, as I’ve pointed out before, would be a geography teacher if it weren’t for the amazing good fortune of imminent apocalypse

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_restaurant_review_to_warm_to/

Behind paywall.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/a_a_gill/article6225761.ece


Is our love of nature writing bourgeois escapism? -  Steven Poole


So goes the green version of the English Defence League: sheep aren't natives! They are "a feral invasive species". They don't belong here. "Invasive species," Monbiot complains, "challenge attempts to defend a unique and distinctive fauna and flora" – just as anti-immigration demagogues claim that foreigners will destroy a unique and distinctive British culture. "Certain animals and plants," Monbiot warns us, even "have characteristics that allow them to invade" – what, like Panzers and U-boats? – "and colonise many parts of the world."

Thus each ecosystem is conceived as a little Westphalian nation state, vulnerable to assault by expansionist outsiders. By the 1930s, unfortunately, the most vocal back-to-the-landers were fascists, in Britain and elsewhere: only by protecting and nurturing the national soil, it was argued, could we guarantee the ongoing purity of the national bloodline. (The "invasive species" here were Jews and other undesirable humans.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/06/nature-writing-revival