George Monbiot

One of the UK’s best-known environmentalists and activists George Monbiot discusses devastation of the natural world, inequality, corporate power, obsessions with growing profit and the decline in political debate – and gives his take on a lack of debate over the proposed Oxford-Cambridge expressway and conurbation.

Monbiot argues that plans for the expressway and development of a million homes between the two great university cities are a striking example of a decision made that the public has no party to. By the time it is up for debate, there is little left to decide. Monbiot argues that the major questions about whether continued growth is desirable in one of the wealthiest regions of the world and the impact of that growth on pollution and climate have already been closed off to debate.

Monbiot has a weekly column in the Guardian. He is author of Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis; How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature; Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning; and Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. He recently helped to found Rewilding Britain, which seeks to redefine people’s relationship to the living world.

This event is part of a series at the festival labelled Pasture to Plate® that consider issues around farming, pasture-fed food, rotation of crops, rewilding and rural literature.