Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
George Monbiot
Oration given on 19 July 2007
Chancellor, the Senate has resolved that the degree of Doctor
of the University be conferred on PROFESSOR GEORGE MONBIOT.
All indigenous people have strong oral traditions. They tell stories to
pass on knowledge from one generation to another, and also to guide
behaviour. One group well noted for their stories are the Western Apache
(headed up a century or more ago by the likes of Geronimo and Cochise), who
were written about beautifully by author Keith Basso. One form of their
story telling is the arrow story. The recipient hears the story, and its
moral message sticks like an arrow. And they always begin these stories with
the words, “it happened at…”, and end it in the same way, so that a story
and a place name become intimately connected. Places then become associated
with wisdom, and attain cultural as well as ecological significance. No one
is more aware of the value of story telling than George Monbiot. As one of
the country’s foremost environmental journalists, as well as author and
activist, he has championed many vital causes, often in the face of
considerable opposition, and has contributed new ideas that have stuck in
the body politic rather like Apache arrows.
George Monbiot was educated at Stowe School, and studied Zoology at
Oxford. After graduation, he became a radio producer with the BBC’s Natural
History Unit, making investigative environmental programmes. He then worked
for the World Service as a producer and presenter, before embarking on his
freelance career that would take him across the tropics to investigate and
write about the lives of people facing the colonising threats of modern
economic development.
His first book, Poisoned Arrows, was published in 1989, and drew upon a
series of extraordinary adventures in Indonesia. There remains something of
the order of 600 indigenous peoples across the world, and their cultures and
environments are now under threat. Humans were hunter-gatherers for some
300,000 generations, invented agriculture 600 generations ago, and we became
industrialised just 6-8 generations ago. If you squeezed human history into
one week, the industrialised bit comes just three seconds before midnight on
the 7th day – its lately come. Yet in those three seconds, we have invented
forms of economic development that have brought great wealth to many people,
but have actively harmed many long-standing cultures and environments.
It was this experience in Western Papua, learning from a “delightful and
unacquisitive people”, as he puts it, that George Monbiot ceased to be just
a journalist, and became a campaigner for change. He then spent two more
years in the north-east Amazon regions of Brazil, again studying the effect
of displacement and land alienation, and then after Amazon Watershed was
published, continued his travels in East Africa. Again, the focus was on the
clash between indigenous nomads and the relentless effects of modern
economic development. What is quite clear is that if you write about people
and the land across our small blue-green planet, there is simply no
substitute for going there, for listening and learning, especially from the
right people.
It is though George Monbiot’s more recent books on corporate power,
global governance and the climate change that have told stories about
broader politics. These are full of the gloominess that comes from
understanding how we seem to run this world, but also some optimism about
what should be done differently. He became involved in the anti-roads
movement after being persuaded to visit Twyford Down, and later set up the
organisation, The Land is Ours. He was hospitalised by security guards, and
says, “it was a big shock to me that authorities here could act in that way
as well (as well as in Amazon or West Papua)” Since 1995, he has written a
regular column for the Guardian (weekly since 1998), and he runs a website
that contains articles on topics from advertising to climate change, from
tourism to war. The website receives some 250,000 hits a month. That’s not
bad for a storyteller.
George Monbiot’s 4th book, Captive State, exposed the creeping corporate
takeover of Britain, arguing that commercial involvement in politics was a
threat to democracy. This was almost before it became fashionable and widely
accepted. His 2003 book, The Age of Consent, was then a positive manifesto
for a new world order, suggesting a world parliament, reforms for the UN
General Assembly, an international institution to deal with debt, and a new
fair trade organisation to regulate world trade to protect poorer countries.
His most recent book, Heat, focuses on the world’s greatest environmental
problem. Oddly, this was his first explicitly environmental book. Humans
have always affected their environments, and have been shaped by them in
return. In recent times, our impacts have become larger, and some
substantial, such as the relentless loss of the rainforests, and the hole in
the ozone layer. But it’s climate change that is the sign of the world
creaking at the seams. It cannot take much more.
But it will have to, it seems. And it is our consumption patterns that
drive climate change, and people’s growing aspirations for an increasingly
single type of lifestyle. There are 75 cars for every 100 people in the US,
and that includes the elderly and the babies. Increasingly, people’s
aspirations in developing countries are to be like those in the
industrialised world. Yet if everybody across the whole of the world at the
moment consumed at the same levels as North American levels, we would need
about eight planets to resource it.
George Monbiot’s Heat also shows how we are sleepwalking into a major
economic problem – it is not just something abstract that happens out there
to environments that we can somehow choose to ignore. It is also not “global
warming”, as contrarians persist in calling it, arguing that life would be
better if the weather was a bit warmer. We might not agree in this room
perhaps later today! And anyway, they say, it is not being caused by humans;
they blame sunspots and wobbles in the Earth’s orbit and the like. This is
arrant nonsense, and not only does George Monbiot show this, he also sets
out another positive agenda – what we can do to reduce carbon emissions by
90% from current levels.
George Monbiot has won many prizes for environmental activities,
journalism, screenwriting and radio production. He is often asked for career
advice, and says one thing: “be wary of following the career advice from
your college”. This is not to be critical of our careers’ service (they paid
a few quid for me to put that bit in here!) – but he warns graduates to
follow their own grand plans and interests. The Chancellor gave this advice
at the beginning as well. You all begin with ideas about changing the world,
and all too easily may find yourself giving in, later becoming captive
rather than free. “You only have one life”, George Monbiot says, “so why
waste it?” And that is one of the things that George has not done.
Strangely, though, he is one of the few people to have seen their own
obituary. He once picked up a newspaper in Sao Paolo and saw a front-page
article about the death of a British journalist in the very region where he
was working. “Oh my goodness”, he said on reading further, “it is me!”
Chancellor, it is my great pleasure to present to you a very
living GEORGE MONBIOT.
Orator: Professor Jules Pretty OBE