To get out of the mess we’re in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for altruism and cooperation.
This contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future. It was given at the recent TED Summit in Edinburgh, a global gathering of 1,000 TED Speakers, TED Fellows, TED Translators, TED-ED volunteers and TEDx organisers. OPEN CEO Tony Cooke was there in person in his capacity as a TEDx organiser.
It will resonate well with those in the OPEN Community who are focused on pluralist economics, on post-neoliberalism or humanistic management. It will also be of interest to anyone researching the power of narratives, i.e. the stories we tell ourselves, and how they drive our behaviour.
As a young man, George Monbiot spent six years working as an investigative journalist in West Papua, Brazil and East Africa, during which time he was shot at, shipwrecked, beaten up, stung into a poisoned coma by hornets, became lost for days in a rainforest (where he ate rats and insects to avert starvation) and (incorrectly) pronounced clinically dead in a hospital in northern Kenya. Today, he leads a less adventurous life as an author, columnist for the Guardian and environmental campaigner.
Among his books and projects are Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life; The Age of Consent; and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. His latest book is Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. He has made a number of viral videos. One of them, “How Wolves Change Rivers,” based on an extract from his last TED Talk, has been watched 40 million times on YouTube.