British journalist, environmental activist, and long-running Guardian columnist whose work since the late 1990s has been a sustained attempt to join ecological crisis and political-economic critique into a single framework. Monbiot trained as a zoologist at Oxford, spent his early career reporting from Indonesian, Brazilian, and East African forests (narrowly surviving several encounters that he recounts with dry self-deprecation), and returned to Britain with the conviction that the ecological emergencies he had witnessed had their causes not in backward places but in the financial capitals that organized extraction.
His books range across subjects — land use in Britain (Feral, 2013, a major statement of rewilding); the case for a functioning global democracy (The Age of Consent, 2003); the political and psychological machinery of inaction on climate (Heat, 2006); and, in his most widely influential recent work, the neoliberal reshaping of political life. Out of the Wreckage (2017) argued that the left has lost because it has failed to offer a new story to replace the neoliberal story; his 2016 Guardian essay "Neoliberalism: the ideology at the root of all our problems" remains one of the most-shared pieces of political journalism of the decade.
His recent Regenesis (2022) turned toward food — arguing that the agricultural system is the single largest driver of biodiversity collapse, and that precision fermentation and other technologies offer a plausible escape from livestock-centric farming. His columns remain his most continuous product: hard-targeted, heavily sourced, polemical in the English essayistic tradition, and unusually willing to change position in public when the evidence shifts.