Bring on the Apocalypse, a collection of the columns George Monbiot has written since 1999 for the Guardian, which he also archives on his website www.monbiot.com, explores the potentially devastating implications of the melting of the ice caps and the continued proliferation of greenhouse gases.
But
it also links them with less obvious topics such as the Silver Ring Thing virginity pledge and the War on Terror, highlighting a destructive tsunami-style butterfly effect that connects what happens in Texas to events in the Middle East.
"I worked out what the main themes were that I had been writing about and then selected a few articles in each category that seemed to represent those themes," says Monbiot, who divided the book into Arguments with God, Nature, War, Power, Money and Culture.
One of the most disturbing aspects of these essays of self-destruction - to borrow the book's sub-title - is that some of the columns, such as "Natural Aesthetes", which deals with the threat to biodiversity from the impending extinction of rare species such as the king protea and the silky sifaka, was written more than over four years ago.
Monbiot reserves his fiercest ire for frequent New Zealand visitor and famous television botanist David Bellamy, who claimed that "many of the world's glaciers are not shrinking but are growing". In "Junk Science", published in the Guardian in 2005, Monbiot says Bellamy's figures came from a website run by former architect Robert W. Felix, which was "so bonkers I thought at first it was a spoof."
Then last year, Bellamy wrote about "the global warming myth," claiming climate patterns need to be analysed over thousand-year periods instead of mere 60-year cycles and that "there has been no sign of global warming in New Zealand since 1955". Bring on the Apocalypse? If you believe Monbiot, it's already arrived.
