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.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the idea that nature exists solely for human use and highlights the consequences of valuing it only in monetary terms.
George Monbiot emphasizes the danger of viewing nature merely as a resource for human exploitation. He warns that treating nature as an entity with value only in monetary terms leads to detrimental effects on the environment and all forms of life. The quote serves as a call to recognize the intrinsic value of nature and to understand that what cannot be quantified in cash should still be deeply respected and preserved.
In practice
During a climate change awareness conference, this quote can be used to provoke thoughts on our relationship with nature.
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.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
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.
You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances... it's our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to seize this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
The message is simple: love and conserve our wildlife.
What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.
Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.
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