George Monbiot
Ungainly on land
- What we see in the UK today, and around the world, is a truth many people are reluctant to recognise: Centralised, hierarchical political systems are innately undemocratic, regardless of who is in charge. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- Starmer is simultaneously detoxifying Reform and toxifying the Labour Party. I ask again, what is he playing at?
- After due consideration, having weighed up the relevant evidence, assessed the balance of arguments and gamed the likely implications, I have reached the conclusion that Keir Starmer can fuck off from a great height.
- [This post could not be retrieved]
- On reflection, I realise my post might have come across as disrespectful. What I should have said is that *Sir* Keir Starmer can fuck off from a great height. My apologies for any offence caused.
- Here, @westcountryvoices.bsky.social have compiled my thread on the utterly bonkers mismanagement of Dartmoor into an easy-to-read article: westcountryvoices.co.uk/prepare-your...
- 1. This is Piles Copse, the largest remaining fragment of high-ground temperate rainforest on Dartmoor. It’s a tiny speck of green in a dismal, human-made desert. Prepare yourselves for a story of breathtaking perversity, told in this thread. (There’s a one-page version at the bottom). 🧵
-
View full thread29. We are paying for this catastrophe. We should decide how our money is spent: no taxation without representation! Especially in a *national park*. Public money should buy public goods. At the moment it buys an ecological disaster. Enough already.
- The thread on one page. Thank you for bearing with me: skywriter.blue/pages/george...
- 26. The thing about power is that, in the absence of effective challenge, it becomes hegemonic. Almost everyone adopts the worldview of the powerful. Dartmoor National Park channels commoner power and commoner beliefs, as we’ve already seen. But the same applies to some conservationists.
- 27. While well-meaning, even they recite the “undergrazing” myth. They call for replacing one fireprone disasterscape with another. If they saw this grazing and burning cataclysm in Brazil, they’d know it for what it is. But here the blinkers are on. foundationforcommonland.org.uk/commons-stor...
- 24. Now it’s true that one possible way of suppressing Molinia is by running cattle on it over the course of one winter, so that their trampling breaks up the sward. But unless this is a deliberate step towards the restoration of either rainforest or blanket bog, it will solve nothing.
- 25. Needless to say, that’s not what the Commoner-Kings want. They want to restore sheep grazing, which will take us straight back, with the help of even more lashings of public money, to Molinia desert.
