Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

In this book, the author George Monbiot lays the vision for a new philosophy of environmental protection that is for the people, puts people first, and turns out to be better for the ecosystems and wildlife as well.

It is about "restoring what ecologists call trophic diversity", and "rewilding of human life".

This is a book not just about vision and ideas, but of hope.

"sustaining the morale of people engaged in any political struggle requires a positive vision. It is not enough to know what you are fighting against: you must also know what you are fighting for.

An ounce of hope is a more powerful stimulant than a ton of despair."

This new philosophy is called 'Rewilding'. "Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way."

Rewilding "lets nature decide."

"The positive environmentalism I develop in Feral is intended to create a vision of a better place, which we can keep in mind even as we seek to prevent our governments from engineering a worse one."

This new philosophy of environmental protection will "transform places that now seem bleak and almost dead into a rich and complex ferment of life."

"the scientific principle behind rewilding is restoring what ecologists call trophic diversity. Trophic means relating to food and feeding. Restoring trophic diversity means enhancing the number of opportunities for animals, plants and other creatures to feed on each other; to rebuild the broken strands in the web of life. It means expanding the web both vertically and horizontally, increasing the number of trophic levels (top predators, middle predators, plant eaters, plants, carrion and detritus feeders) and creating opportunities for the number and complexity of relationships at every level to rise."

The second and probably more important aspect of rewilding is "rewilding of human life".

For adults, it means "rewild my own life, to escape from ecological boredom. "

"Rewilding, paradoxically, should take place for the benefit of people, to enhance the world in which we live, and not for the sake of an abstraction we call Nature."

The author says "I will be happy if this book helps to stimulate new thinking about our place on the living planet and the ways in which we might engage with it."

Trophic cascades

"Trophic means relating to food and feeding."

"Predators and large herbivores can transform the places in which they live. "

"A trophic cascade occurs when the animals at the top of the food chain – the top predators – change the numbers not just of their prey, but also of species with which they have no direct connection.

Their impacts cascade down the food chain, in some cases radically changing the ecosystem, the landscape and even the chemical composition of the soil and the atmosphere."

"There is no substitute for these complex relationships. "

The author gives several examples where existing government laws and practices are the ones causing maximum damage. It will be better if environment was left alone - with low disturbance.

"Throughout the period in which wolves were absent from Yellowstone National Park, its managers tried to control the deer and contain their impacts – and failed. Despite intense hunting and culling, willow trees disappeared from the meadows and aspens were in danger of vanishing from large areas of the park. Even when hunting by humans is intense, its effects are likely to differ sharply from those of hunting by wolves. Wolves hunt at all times of the day and night, throughout the year. They pursue their prey, rather than killing it from a distance. Wolves and humans hunt in different places and select different animals from the herd. Fencing might keep out the deer, but unlike wolves it does so entirely, while also excluding other animals and reducing the connectedness of the ecosystem."

"One study suggests that between 15 and 18 per cent of the nitrogen in the leaves of spruce trees within 500 metres of a salmon stream comes from the sea: it was brought upriver in the bodies of the salmon.45 Top predators and keystone species unwittingly re-engineer the environment, even down to the composition of the soil."

"One of the interesting implications of the discovery of widespread trophic cascades is that removing an animal from a system – especially a top predator – may have counterintuitive and destructive results. For example, in many parts of Africa, people have killed lions and leopards in the belief that this will enhance their chances of survival and (among early European hunters) boost the herds of game. But one result has been an explosion in the population of olive baboons. They inflict such damage on crops and livestock that children have to be taken out of school to fend them off."

So much lost before we even are aware of it

"Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Ecologists are not always aware of the extent to which the systems they study have been altered by humans: that the life they describe has been greatly simplified and diminished."

"Much of the richness and complexity – the trophic diversity – of these foodwebs was lost before it was recorded. We live in a shadowland, a dim, flattened relic of what there once was, of what there could be again."

Modern wildlife and ecosystem conservation

The author gives several examples where existing government laws and practices are the ones causing maximum damage. It will be better if environment was left alone - with low disturbance.

"The lesson I learnt repeatedly, in all three regions, was that much of the diversity and complexity of nature could be sustained only if levels of disturbance were low. Major intrusions, such as clearing trees and raising cattle, quickly simplified the ecosystem."

"many conservationists appear to believe the opposite: that the diversity, integrity and ‘health’ of the natural world depend upon 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 belief 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."

"Armies of conservation volunteers are employed to prevent natural processes from occurring. Land is intensively grazed to ensure that the plants do not recover from intensive grazing. "

Hunting

"In fact hunting, strange as this may sound, could be the wolf’s salvation. There are three reasons for this.

The first is that, as with wild boar, allowing licensed hunters to shoot wolves is likely to create a powerful lobby for their protection, just as anglers have become the staunchest defenders of fish stocks.

The second is that it shows other people that the animals are under control. I feel we control our wild-life too much, but the wolf has a public relations problem, and the idea that it should be allowed to roam and breed without check is likely to be too much for many people to contemplate. Licensed hunting in Sweden has gone some way towards making the wolf politically acceptable there, after it reintroduced itself from Finland in the 1970s, provoking widespread demands that it be exterminated. I was told something similar by a forest officer in Slovenia: were it not for the authorized hunting of wolves and bears, they would be wiped out by unauthorized hunters, concerned that no one was managing them. In both countries, however, the number of wolves hunters are allowed to shoot every year is a highly contentious issue: over-hunting is suppressing the population of wolves to the extent that their genetic viability is threatened.

The third and most important reason is that it keeps the wolves afraid. As the review of wolf attacks suggests, the best means of protecting people from wolves is to ensure that wolves go nowhere near them. Nothing is likely to do this more effectively than an occasional shooting. Now we might hunt the wolf in order to preserve it (but not within protected areas)."

Transform disaster into a source of pride

Author gives example of Slovenia which has seen collapse of communities during World War II, socialist times, and then during turbulent 1990s during breakup of neighboring Yugoslavia.

"The barren lands of Kocˇevje, whose population had been relocated and dispersed first by the Nazis then by the socialist government and the Red Army, were never recolonized. When the farms were abandoned and the pastures no longer grazed by sheep and goats, the seed which rained into them from the neighbouring woods was allowed to sprout once more. The land has been repopulated by trees."

It was allowed to naturally rewild.

"Most of the rewilding that has taken place on earth so far has happened as a result of humanitarian disasters."

"The rewilding of the western side of Slovenia, the rapid regrowth of forests there and the recovery of its populations of bears, wolves, lynx, wild boar, ibex, martens, giant owls and other remarkable creatures, took place at the expense of its human population. "

"The forests and their wildlife, the mountains, repopulated by ibex and chamois, the caves with their endemic species of blind salaman- der, known to locals as the human fish on account of its smooth pink skin, the rivers with their steady flow and excellent whitewater rafting, the extraordinary beauty of this regenerated land, draw people from the rest of Slovenia, from all over Europe and beyond. As I talked to many Slovenians, it became clear that the integrity of the natural environment was now a source of national pride."

Which people

A contentious issue with environmentalism is 'who decides'.

The usual answer is "the people of this nation should decide".

"Firstly, which people and which Nation? The loudest? The most well educated? The greatest percentage of the overall population? There is another value judgement here, do we value the enhancement and enrichment of outsiders’ lives over the needs of the existing community, placing the recreational and emotional needs of for example West Midlanders over those of the local population?"

Which people should decide? Is it the people on whose lands a dam is being built. Or the millions of parched souls who will benefit from it?

Author also asks us to be careful that rewilding "must never be used as an instrument of expropriation or dispossession. One of the chapters in this book describes some of the forced rewildings that have taken place around the world, and the human tragedies they have caused."

Rewilding our life

"Rewilding, paradoxically, should take place for the benefit of people, to enhance the world in which we live, and not for the sake of an abstraction we call Nature."

"Feral proposes an environmentalism which, without damaging the lives of others or the fabric of the biosphere, offers to expand rather than constrain the scope of people’s lives. It offers new freedoms in exchange for those we have sought to restrict."

The author gives example of initial contact between American Indians(Native Americans) and Europeans in the 1600s.

"The encounter between the Old and New Worlds was characterized by dispossession, oppression and massacre, but in some places there were periods of friendly engagement." Native American children would end up with Europeans, and sometimes European children would end up with American Indians(Native Americans) families if they got lost.

After being founded and re-united, no child of either race/ethnicity would prefer to live with Europeans. Every child of either race/ethnicity would prefer to live with American Indians(Native Americans).

"In every case, Crèvecoeur and Franklin tell us, the Europeans chose to stay with the Native Americans, and the Native Americans returned, at the first opportunity, to their own communities. This says more than is comfortable about our own lives."

"the reasons they gave me would greatly surprise you: the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.. thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of these Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"

The author explains that in our pursuit of material life and comfort, "We have privileged safety over experience; gained much in doing so, and lost much."

There is deep human desire for joy, surprises, stimulation, freedom, adventure, enchantment. Modern life is designed to suck this out of us. It leads to emptiness in adult life, and diseases of modern age.

"Obesity, rickets, asthma, myopia, the decline in heart and lung function all appear to be associated with the sedentary indoor life."

"lack of contact with the natural world to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.5 Research conducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees and grass is associated with a reduction in indications of ADHD, while playing indoors or on tarmac appears to increase them. One paper suggests that playing out of doors improves children’s reasoning and observation, another that outdoor education enhances their reading, writing, science and maths. Perhaps children would do better at school if they spent less time in the classroom".

"Missing from children’s lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods. Watching my child and others, it seems to me that deep cover encourages deep play, that big trees, an understorey mazed by fallen trunks and shrubs which conceal dells and banks and holes and overhangs, draw children out of the known world and into others. Almost immediately the woods become peopled with other beings, become the setting for rhapsodic myth and saga, translate the children into characters in an ageless epic, always new, always the same. Here, genetic memories reawaken, ancient impulses are unearthed, age-old patterns of play and discovery recited".

"One difference between indoor entertainment and outdoor play is that the outdoors has an endless capacity to surprise. Its joys are unscripted, its discoveries your own. The thought that most of our children will never be startled by a dolphin breaching, a nightingale singing, the explosive flight of a woodcock, the rustle of an adder is almost as sad as the disappearance of such species from many of the places in which we once played."

"We have urged only that people consume less, travel less, live not blithely but mindfully, don’t tread on the grass. Without offering new freedoms for which to exchange the old ones, we are often seen as ascetics, killjoys and prigs."

"J. G. Ballard reminded us that ‘the suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.’

We still possess the fear, the courage, the aggression which evolved to see us through our quests and crises, and we still feel the need to exercise them. But our sublimated lives oblige us to invent challenges to replace the horrors of which we have been deprived."

Lack of this genuine enchantment is reason people see strange mythical beasts where none exist. They want to be enchanted. Examples of wildcats in UK, big foot, yeti, are all part of our deep unfulfilled desire to be enchanted by the wild.

Rewilding children

"Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the 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 has gone."

"As Griffiths shows, enclosure, accompanied by a rapid replacement of the commoners’ polyculture with a landlord’s monoculture, destroyed much of what made the land delightful to children – the ancient trees and unploughed dells, the ponds and rushy meadows, the woods, heath and scrub – and banned them from what it failed to destroy. Destruction and exclusion have continued long beyond the nineteenth century. So many fences are raised to shut us out that eventually they shut us in.

Enclosure, Griffiths notes, also terminated the long cycle of festivals and carnivals through which people celebrated their marriage to the land, when authority was subverted and mischief made. The places where the festivals had been held were closed, fenced and policed."

Indoor life is now more dangerous than outdoor life. "Obesity, rickets, asthma, myopia, the decline in heart and lung function all appear to be associated with the sedentary indoor life."

"lack of contact with the natural world to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder."

"Research conducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees and grass is associated with a reduction in indications of ADHD, while playing indoors or on tarmac appears to increase them."

"One paper suggests that playing out of doors improves children's reasoning and observation, another that outdoor education enhances their reading, writing, science and maths. Perhaps children would do better at school if they spent less time in the classroom."

"Missing from children’s lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods. Watching my child and others, it seems to me that deep cover encourages deep play, that big trees, an understorey mazed by fallen trunks and shrubs which conceal dells and banks and holes and overhangs, draw children out of the known world and into others. Almost immediately the woods become peopled with other beings, become the setting for rhapsodic myth and saga, translate the children into characters in an ageless epic, always new, always the same. Here, genetic memories reawaken, ancient impulses are unearthed, age-old patterns of play and discovery recited."

"One difference between indoor entertainment and outdoor play is that the outdoors has an endless capacity to surprise. Its joys are unscripted, its discoveries your own. The thought that most of our children will never be startled by a dolphin breaching, a nightingale singing, the explosive flight of a woodcock, the rustle of an adder is almost as sad as the disappearance of such species from many of the places in which we once played."

"in many parts of the world the woods have been erased. But now that farming, in the absence of subsidies, has become unviable in certain places, we could be about to witness the reversal of some of the enclosures which have excluded children and adults, and the wildlife in which we once exulted."


The author says "I am used to being disappointed by visionaries, who often turn out to be lunatics or frauds, or to be afflicted with ossifying pride."

Toxic ideologies by pseudo-intellectuals get promoted in an incestuous groupthink. These ideologies are then adopted by the bureaucrats and governments.

The author talks of how government policies and decisions are made: "that if there’s even a one percent chance that our policy will not cause catastrophe, we’ll take it."

So much has been lost, and so much being actively destroyed by environmentalists and government.

"in many parts of the world the woods have been erased. But now that farming, in the absence of subsidies, has become unviable in certain places, we could be about to witness the reversal of some of the enclosures which have excluded children and adults, and the wildlife in which we once exulted."

This collapse of system of subsidies and commercial farming will free up land used for unviable and toxic food production. Major economic or political changes will also bring new opportunities to revisit the way our ecosystems are managed.

It will bring new opportunities to rewild the ecosystems as well as our life.

The book "Feral proposes an environmentalism which, without damaging the lives of others or the fabric of the biosphere, offers to expand rather than constrain the scope of people’s lives."

"Environmentalism in the twentieth century foresaw a silent spring, in which the further degradation of the biosphere seemed inevitable".





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