William Leith26 June 2015
George Monbiot is my favourite environmental writer.
The thing about him is that he’s bold and radical — but not in the way you might think. He says that if Britons wanted to live like hunter-gatherers there would only be room for 5,000 of us, at most. Any more and we’d run out of wild animals to eat. So farming is necessary. Monbiot also sees that environmentalists often look like pure nay-sayers - “ascetics, killjoys and prigs”.
But you don’t have to be a prig — instead, why not make a start by exploring your wild, feral side? That’s what he does. And it’s bracingly atavistic; our urge to be civilised, we see, might be killing us.
