George Monbiot

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; Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning; and Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. His latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity.

Monbiot 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.