George Monbiot

Without a restoration story,

that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to change.

But with such a restoration story, almost everything can change.

The story we need to tell

is a story which will appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, crossing political fault lines.

It should resonate with deep needs and desires.

It should be simple and intelligible.

And it should be grounded in reality.

Now, I admit that all this sounds like a bit of a tall order.

But I believe that in Western nations, there is actually a story like this waiting to be told.

Over the past few years, there's been a fascinating convergence of findings in several different sciences, in psychology, in anthropology, in neuroscience, in evolutionary biology, and they all tell us something pretty amazing, that human beings have got this massive capacity for altruism.

Sure, we all have a bit of selfishness and greed inside us, but in most people, those are not our dominant values.

And we also turn out to be the supreme cooperators.

We survived the African savannas, despite being weaker and slower than our predators and most of our prey, by an amazing ability to engage in mutual aid.

and that urge to cooperate has been hardwired into our minds through natural selection.

These are the central, crucial facts about humankind, our amazing altruism and cooperation.

But something has gone horribly wrong.

Disorder afflicts the land.

Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces, but I think the most powerful of them is the dominant political narrative of our times, which tells us that we should live in extreme individualism and competition with each other.

It pushes us to fight each other, to fear and mistrust each other.