George Monbiot - Career

Career

After graduating in Zoology, he joined the BBC Natural History Unit as a radio producer, making natural history and environmental programmes. He transferred to the BBC's World Service, where he worked briefly as a current affairs producer and presenter, before leaving to research and write his first book.

Working as an investigative journalist, he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil, and East Africa. His activities led to his being made persona non grata in seven countries and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia. In these places, he was also shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria.

In Britain, he joined the roads protest movement and was often called to give press interviews. He was denounced as "nothing but a bandwagoner" and a "media tart" by groups such as Green Anarchist and Class War. He was attacked by security guards, who allegedly drove a metal spike through his foot, smashing the middle metatarsal bone. His injuries left him in hospital. Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British diplomat at the United Nations, who was then Warden at Green College, Oxford, made the young protester a fellow, so that he had an office to organise his campaign from. He was an active member of the Pure Genius!! campaign and co-founded The Land is Ours, which has occupied land all over the country. Its first notable success was in 1997, when it occupied thirteen acres (five hectares) of prime real estate on the river in London upon which owners Diageo intended to build a superstore. The protesters beat Diageo in court, built an "eco-village" and held on to the land for six months.

Among his best-known articles are his critique of David Bellamy's climate science, his description of an encounter with a police torturer in Brazil, his attack on libertarian interpretations of genetics, his discussion of the ethics of outsourcing, and his attack on the politics of Bob Geldof and Bono. In January 2011, in response to widespread claims that he is a millionaire, Monbiot took the unusual step of publishing an account of his assets. In the interests of transparency, explained Monbiot that he earned £77,400 a year, gross, from publishing contracts and rents, and urged other journalists to follow suit.

He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science).

Monbiot lived in Oxford for many years, but in 2007 moved with his wife, writer and campaigner Angharad Penrhyn Jones, and daughter to a low emissions house in the mid-Wales market town of Machynlleth. Monbiot's second daughter was born in the spring of 2012.

In November 2012 he apologised to Lord McAlpine for his "stupidity and thoughtlessness" in implying, in a tweet, that the Tory peer was a paedophile.