George Monbiot

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I've done so slowly and reluctantly. Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.

On my first night at boarding school, I felt entirely alone. I was shocked, frightened and intensely homesick, but I soon discovered that expressing these emotions, instead of bringing help and consolation, attracted a gloating, predatory fascination.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

Emotionally damaged men all too often rip apart their own lives, and those of their partners and children. I see both physical fitness and emotional strength as virtues, but they are acquired by entirely different means.

We should seek to love our lives and live fully, but not to extend them indefinitely. We should love our children exuberantly, but not cling to them or curtail their freedoms. We should treasure the material world without seeking to own and control it.

In talking about my cancer with family and friends, I feel the love that I know will get me through this. The old strategy of suffering in silence could not have been more misguided.

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others.

I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.

I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can't live with it through every hour of every day.

When I kayak in Cardigan Bay, in Wales, what I hope to find above all else is dolphins. Sometimes I do, and these days are the waymarks of my life.

While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity - need fail for everything to slide.