George Monbiot; Feral

Feral; George Monbiot

George Monbiot studied zoology at Oxford University, and has spent his carrer as a journalist and environmental activist, working with others to defend the natural world he loves.  He is a Guardian columnist and his articles are read throughout the world.  He is the author of several books and among other prizes he has won the UN Global 500 award for outstanding environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela.  He has a TED talk on rewilding an extract of which can be viewed on Youtube.

Feral is the story of Monbiot’s efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living.  He shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder back into our lives.  Feral lays out a new environmentalism in which nature is allowed to find its own way.  He shows how rewilding could repair the living planet, creating ecosystems in post-industrial nations as profuse and captivating as any around the world.  Already large wild animals are beginning to spread back across Europe, and fin whales, humbacks and bluefin tuna are returning to the seas around Britain.  Feral is a work of hope that argues for mass restoration of the natural world – and a powerful call for us to reclaim our own place in it.

I found this a fascinating, riveting and illuminating book.  It has helped inform not just my BOW and extended essay, but some further photography I am working with on rewilding.

Below are my main points of interest from the book:-

·        The rewilding of natural ecosystems that fascinates me is not an attempt to restore them to any prior state, but to permit ecological processes to resume. P8

·        I find these double standards hard to explain.  I wonder whether our campaigns against deforestation elsewhere in the world, commendable as they may be, are a way of not seeing what happened in our own country. P68

·        The open, treeless hills (of central Wales) are widely seen as natural.  The chairman of a trade association called Cambria Active describes the scoured acid grassland it is trying to promote to tourists as ‘one of the largest wildernesses left in the UK.’ P69

·        The sheep has caused more extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building that has ever taken place. P70

·        Richie is obsessed with birds and for that reason, he says, he can seldom watch a television drama. @There’s this hideous habit in which British films are overdubbed with American bird tracks.  They’re obsessive about the setting, the period costumes, the hair, the vehicles, the horses, but they always get the birdsong wrong...........I cannot stand it: it’s a measure of how disengaged we are.  We could probably as a nation lose all our birds and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice.’ P71/2

·        As we become more urban we are losing our attachment’. P72

·        It didn’t take me long to see that the most radical thing you could do around here was to put fences around the woods and keep the sheep out. (Richie Tassel) P73

·        Almost every tree we planted has now been overwhelmed by native birch.  It grew so densely it looked like the cress you grow on your windowsill.  Even the trees we planted survived the local birches did better.  They’re genetically suited to this site.  Seeing the way the birch recolonized was a real awakening.  I saw that nature is far more adept at doing these things than we are.’ (Richie Tassel) P74

·        The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species.  A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest.  This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there. P81

·        Our rivers like the land have suffered from intensive management.  They have been straightened out and canalized, dredged and cleared.  The results have hurt both wildlife and people: by reducing the amount of time that the water takes to flow from the tributaries into the lower reaches we have ensured that rivers are more likely to flood. (My son has done research on this as part of his outdoor studies degree at Cumbria Uni following the dramatic and costly flooding that occurred in the Lake District in 2015) P82

·        But rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. P83

·        This is a reminder that rewilding, like any change we contemplate, has costs.  In some cases the costs may outweigh the benefits. P87

·        This is crucially different from the ethos of human domination.  Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.’ P105

·        Britain has lost more of its large native species – both carnivores and herbivores – than any other European country except the Republic of Ireland.  Britain also happens to be the slowest and most reluctant of any European nation to begin rewilding the land and reintroducing its missing species.  Perhaps this is connected to the fact that we have one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world  ..... Though they and their views tend to belong to a very small minority, they dominate rural policy, and very little can be done without their agreement. P107

·        The Pan Parks Foundation uses a definition of wilderness produced by a coalition of wildlife groups: ‘Wilderness areas are large unmodified or only slightly modified natural areas, governed by natural processes, without human intervention, infrastructure or permanent habitation, which should be protected and overseen so as to preserve their natural condition and to offer people the opportunity to experience the spiritual quality of nature.’ P109

·        Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in greatest need of rewilding are our children.  The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world.  In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed in has gone.  Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision in the UK has decreased by almost 90%, while the proportion  of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten.  Parents are wrongly terrified of strangers and rightly terrified of traffic.   Ref Chris Pakham and Rob Moore (Living Landscapes)P167

·        The commons was home for boy or bird but the Eclosures stole the nests of both, reaved children of the site of their childhood, robbed them of animal-tutors and river-mentors and stole their deep dream shelters.  The great outdoors was fenced off and marked ‘Trespassers Will be Prosecuted.’  Over the generations, as the outdoors shrank, the indoor world enlarged in importance. (Jay Griffiths 2013, Kith:The Riddle of Childscape.) P167/8

·        Studies summarized in Richard Louv’s Book Last Child in the Woods, appear to link a lack of contact with the natural world to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) P169

·        Missing from children’s lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods. P169

·        The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before.  Humanity’s loss was natures gain. P198

·        The biologist Felisa Smith proposes that the extermination of the American megafauna by Mesolithic hunters was responsible for another mini ice agae which began 12,800 years ago and lasted for 1300 years. P170

·        In Landscape and Memory Simon Schama explores the narratives and impulses which gave rise to what could be described as Nazi rewilding projects. (In the Bialowieza Forest. Interestingly and worryingly the Polish authorities have just allowed logging to take place in the forest although Europe’s oldest court has ordered them to end it. – BBC News website 29.7.17) P199

·        The land was rewilded by brute force. P200

·        Goring’s brutalities in Eastern Poland were an extreme form of what the Normans did in England. P200

·        The principle of forest law was exported to the British colonies.  In Kenya, the colonial authorities evicted local inhabitantsfrom land they designated as game reserves...... only rangers, wardens and paying tourists were allowed into the parks and reserves.  If the people who had lived on those lands tried to return to them, they would be treated as trespassers or poachers. P201

·        Dr Richard Leakey, when challenged by Monbiot produced a brutally utilitarian defence of enclosure and clearance. P201

·        Though the mores of modern wildlife agencies are not comparable to those of the Nazis, there are common themes, which long predate the Third Reich and which have continued long beyond its collapse, informing a process that could be described as forced rewilding. P202

·        Since Schama’s book was published further research has cast new light on Nazi attitudes to nature and rewilding..........recent discoveries about the dark side of Professor Konrad Lorenz........... P203

·        Lorenz joined the Nazi Party and became a member of its Office for Race Policy overseen by Himmler and proposed a programme of eugenics which suggested that humans could be bred to meet not only a physical ideal but also an ethical one.  He believed in not just a master race but a master species. P203

·        The forced rewildings which have taken place elsewhere offer a pungent warning of how this project could go badly wrong ifwe are not mindful of the hazards and antecedents.  Rewilding must not be an imposition.  There is no need for coercion.........the large-scale restoration of living systems and natural processes can take place without harming anyone’s interests. P208

·        What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Lt them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins – Inversnaid

·        Many conservationists appear to believe (the opposite): that the diversity, integrity and ‘health’ of the natural depend on human intervention, often intense intervention, which they describe as ‘management’ or ‘stewardship’.  More often than not, this involves clearing trees and using cattle and sheep to suppress the vegetation.  To a lesser extent, the same brief prevails in several other parts of the rich world.  Some of our conservation groups appear to be not just zoophobic but also dendrophobic: afraid of trees.  They seem afraid of the disorderly, unplanned, unstructured revival of the natural world. P210

·        A few hundred yards further along the road I stopped again.  Taller rowans and sallows were growing on the verge, as well as hawthorn and elder.  Around them the heather rose above my waist.  The bilberries were covered in in fat darl fruit and thick with cuckoospit.  Small heath butterflies, little pale moths and chironomid midges swarmed around the plants.......The only rich repositories of life were the verges of the roads, partly at least because the sheep could not reach them. P213/4

·        The way in which we engage with nature will always be mediated by culture. P220

·        We rightly deplore the apparent unconcern with which this species is being driven to extinction.  But it is not a wolrld apart from the habits of liberal, well-educated people I know in Britain – friends and relatives among them – who, despite widespread coverage of the impacts of unsustainable fishing on television and in the newspapers they read, continue to buy species such as swordfish, halibut and king prawns, which are either in dire trouble or whose exploitation causes great ecological damage. P246

·        ........Yet while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the UK, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01% of our territorial waters: 5 out or 48,000 square kilometres. P248

·        When fishing stops, the results are remarkable.  On average, in 124 marine reserves studied around the world, some of which have only been in existence for a few years, the total weight of animals and plants has quadrupled since they were established. P248