Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
Interpretation
The quote highlights the discrepancy between prioritizing financial institutions over environmental protection.
George Monbiot's quote raises a critical question about societal values and priorities. It emphasizes the ease with which governments allocate resources to rescue banks during financial crises while struggling to invest in and protect the biosphere, which is essential for our survival. The stark contrast implies a need to reassess what is deemed valuable and worth saving in our world, suggesting that ecological preservation should be prioritized as much as economic stability.
In practice
In a speech advocating for environmental policy changes.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
Down the hill I went, and then, I forgot the ways of men, For night-scents, heady and damp and cool Wakened ecstasy
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
And still the mad magnificent herald Spring assembles beauty from forgetfulness with the wild trump of April:witchery of sound and odour drives the wingless thing man forth in the bright air.
Tell the Earth how much you care, how beautiful she is, and how much you love her. Ask for her forgiveness for having been so careless.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
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