In Conversation With George Monbiot

Capitalism Is Killing the Planet – It’s Time to Stop Buying Into Our Own Destruction
A Conversation with George Monbiot

Hosted by Elders for Social Justice and Scholarships A-Z, a youth-led activist group based in Tucson, Arizona

Thursday, February 10, 2022
10:00-11:30 am PST / 1:00-2:30 pm EST / 6:00-7:30 pm GMT-UK

This multigenerational, interactive dialogue will be centered around George Monbiot’s article of the same name (The Guardian, October 2021). This is an opportunity for elders to share a dialogue with young climate and social activists and be guided by one of the most outspoken and influential social thinkers and environmental campaigners of our time. 

Globally, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points from climate breakdown, species extinctions, and ecosystem collapse. “Our great intelligence, our highly evolved consciousness that once took us so far, now works against us.” We tend to focus on what George calls “micro-consumerist bollocks,” relatively manageable issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, instead of facing the huge underlying structural forces driving us towards catastrophe.

What are these forces? In our lifetimes, corporate marketing and political messaging have turned us from enabled citizens into powerless, obedient consumers. Our drive for continual economic growth is literally killing us. We are in the grip of “a hypnotizing fairytale,” a distortion propagated by all these forces. George Monbiot emphasizes, “In reality, some people are extremely rich because others are extremely poor. … Massive wealth depends on exploitation.”

Our dialogue will culminate in identifying actions that we, young and old, can take together to help reverse our destructive tendencies before it is too late.

George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist, and environmental campaigner. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life; Heat: how to stop the planet burning; and How Did We Get into This Mess?”. His latest is Out of the Wreckage: A new politics for an age of crisis. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan and has made several viral videos. One of them, adapted from his 2013 TED Talk, How Wolves Change Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 40m times. Another, on Natural Climate Solutions, that he co-presented with Greta Thunberg, has been watched over 60m times. George is working on a new book, to be published in 2022, about how to feed the world without devouring the planet. 

George’s website, www.monbiot.com, provides information on his books, articles, and more.

Follow on Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot

Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot present Nature Now, a short video on natural climate solutions.
Visit Scholarships A-Z, Tucson, Arizona.

Our co-moderators:

Lucero Barraza – Volunteer Executive Team Member, Grassroots Fundraising Lead, Scholarships A-Z
Art Mitchell – Activist and conservation ecologist, EAN volunteer, Elders for Social Justice

Please consider a donation of $10–$40 (a donation is not required to attend, but a portion will go towards supporting the work of Scholarships A-Z)