Feral

by George Monbiot

  Even today, the best means of ensuring that stocks can recover and breed freely—declaring a large part (perhaps the majority) of the Grand Banks a permanent marine reserve in which no fishing takes place—has not happened. All over the world the evidence shows that such no-take zones greatly enhance the overall catch, even though less of the sea is available for fishing. But the Canadian government continues stoutly to defend the nation from the dark forces of science and reason.

  The other great parable which still resonates with the rest of the world—the battle over Clayoquot Sound—began the same way: private companies were given the key to a magnificent ecosystem and told they could treat it as they wished. The forests would have followed the fishery to oblivion had it not been for a coalition of remarkable activists from the First Nations and beyond, who were prepared to lose their freedom—and possibly their lives—to prevent a great wound from being inflicted on the natural world. In 1994 they won, for a few years at least. Their courage in the face of police brutality and judicial repression inspired peaceful direct action movements all over the world.

  So here are the two Canadas: one insatiable, blindly destructive, unmoved by beauty; the other brave, unselfish and far-sighted. There is no doubt about which of the two is now dominant. For Canada today is providing the world with a third parable: the remarkable, perhaps unprecedented story of a complex, diverse economy slipping down the development ladder towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man.

  The tar sands poisoned the politics first of Alberta then of the entire nation. Their story recapitulates that of the Grand Banks. To accommodate rapacious greed, science has been both co-opted and ignored, the Providential Principle has been widely deployed, laws have been redrafted and public life corrupted. The government’s assault on behalf of the tar sands corporations on the common interests of all Canadians has licensed and empowered destructive tendencies throughout the nation.

  Already the planned pipelines whose purpose is to transport the tar to new markets are carrying the toxic sludge of misinformation across Canada. For example, the company hoping to build the Northern Gateway pipeline deleted from the animations it presented to the public one thousand square kilometres of islands, which lie across its tanker route down the Douglas Channel.2 This had the effect of making the project look less threatening to the sensitive coastal ecosystems of British Columbia, and collisions less likely. It also strikes me as symbolic: if the natural world stands in the way, we will erase it.

  Just as government and industry blamed and persecuted seals for the decline of cod in the North Atlantic, so have they blamed and persecuted other predators for the decline of woodland caribou. The Alberta Caribou Committee, which represents such defenders of the natural world as Petro-Canada, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Koch Industries, TransCanada pipelines, Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries and the pulp company Daishowa Marubeni, came together to puzzle over the downfall of the species.3 As there could not possibly be a link to the fragmentation of its habitat by seismic lines, pipelines, roads, oil platforms, timber cutting and the transformation of pristine forest into wasteland, the cause was at first mysterious.

  But, after taking expert advice from one another, the committee members managed to solve the mystery. The problem was, of course, wolves. Although they have lived with caribou for thousands of years, and though caribou seldom feature in their diet,4 wolves have suddenly become an urgent threat to the survival of the species, just as seals suddenly became cod’s nemesis in the 1980s. The committee explained the nature of the problem to the government, which has responded by intensifying its poisoning and shooting of wolves, in order, of course, to protect the natural world.

  But the resurrection of Grand Banks politics has also aroused the spirit of Clayoquot Sound. I see the emergence of the Idle No More movement as one of the most inspiring recent developments anywhere on earth. It demonstrates that the other Canada, though brutally trampled, has not died. The direct actions by the First Nations peoples who lead this movement, in defense of both the living planet and their own patrimony, remind the rest of the world that the Canadian government does not represent the will of all its people.

  Even so, as the sheikhs of Saudi Alberta come to dominate federal politics, and as other provincial governments, harried by lobbyists working for destructive interests, feel licensed by the example of Edmonton and Ottawa to accede to their demands, the nature of Canada—in two senses—is changing with terrible speed. You can see this change manifested in the sharp decline of mountain caribou in British Columbia, caused primarily by logging;5 in the salmon farms destroying the magnificent sockeye runs up the Fraser River; in the near-extinction of the greater sage-grouse; in the refusal to list severely threatened iconic species—such as polar bears, grizzlies, western wolverines, beluga whales and porbeagle sharks—under the Species at Risk Act;6, 7 in the failure to protect the boreal forests; in the auctioning of offshore oil rights in the Arctic, accompanied by the deregulation of oil spill response plans.8

  The new Environmental Assessment Act and the gutting of the old Navigable Waters Protection Act suggest that this festival of destruction has only just begun. For those who appreciate natural beauty and understand ecosystem processes, it must feel like living in a country under enemy occupation. It must also be intensely embarrassing. Canada is becoming a pariah state, whose name now invokes images formerly associated with countries like Nigeria and Congo. Canadian friends joke that they stitch US flags onto their rucksacks when they go abroad.

  So it feels odd, publishing a book about rewilding in a nation undergoing a rapid dewilding. But I hope that there are several respects in which it can be found relevant in Canada. The first is that it seeks to explain fascinating new findings in the science of ecology, which show that you cannot safely disaggregate an ecosystem. The loss of one species often has severe consequences for species and systems to which it appears at first to be unconnected. Killing predators, such as wolves and seals, can have paradoxical impacts, severely damaging the prey species and ecosystems that the culling claims to protect.

  The next is that Feral provides a warning of what Canada’s destination may be. With astonishing speed, in many places your complex and fascinating ecosystems are being reduced to near-deserts of the kind with which we are familiar in Europe. In the United Kingdom we have all but forgotten what we once had, and see our bare hills and empty niches as natural. Some of us find ourselves afflicted by an illdefined longing, which I have come to understand as ecological boredom.

  But perhaps most importantly, as I kept discovering over twenty-eight years of activism and campaigning journalism, 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. 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.

  My proposals are not in any sense a final answer, and they are likely to be developed in different ways in different places, but 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. Nowhere, I believe, is in greater need of that than Canada.

  1

  Raucous Summer

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core

  William Butler Yeats

  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  Every time I lifted off a turf, the same thing appeared: a white comma, curled in the roots of the grass. I picked one up. It had a small ginger head and tiny legs. Its skin was stretched so tight that it seemed
about to burst at the segments. In the tail I could see the indigo streak of its digestive tract. I guessed that it was the larva of a cockchafer, a bronze-backed beetle that swarms in early summer. I watched it twitching for a moment, then I put it in my mouth.

  As soon as it broke on my tongue, two sensations hit me like bullets. The first was the taste. It was sweet, creamy, faintly smoky, like alpine butter. The second was the memory. I knew immediately why I had guessed it was good to eat. I stood in my garden, sleet drilling into the back of my neck, remembering.

  It had taken me a moment, when I woke, to realize where I was. Above my head a blue tarpaulin rippled and snapped in the breeze. I could hear the pumps working, so I must have overslept. I swung my legs over the edge of the hammock and sat blinking in the bright light, gazing across the devastated land. The men were already up to their waists in water, spraying the gravel banks with high-pressure hoses. There had been some shootings in the night, but I could not see any bodies.

  The images of the past few weeks crowded my mind. I remembered Zé, the serial killer who owned the airstrip at Macarão, taking his gunmen into the bar to liven things up, and the man who had been carried out with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. I thought of João, a mestizo from the north-east of Brazil, who had spent ten years crossing the Amazon on foot, walking as far as the mines in Peru and Bolivia, before cutting through the forests for another 2,000 miles to come here. ‘I have killed only three men in my life,’ he told me, ‘and all the deaths were necessary. But I would kill that many again if I stayed here for a month.’

  I recalled the man who had shown me the strange swelling on his calf. When I looked closely I saw that the flesh was writhing with long yellow maggots. I remembered the Professor, with his neat black beard, gold-rimmed spectacles and intense, ascetic manner, the cynical genius who managed the biggest claim for its scarcely literate owner. Before he came here he had, he said, been Director of the University of Rondônia.

  But above all I thought of the man the other miners called Papillon. Blond, muscular, with an Asterix moustache, he towered over the small dark people who had been driven here by poverty and land-theft. He was one of the few, barring the bosses, the traders, the pimps and the owners of the airstrips, who had come to this hell through choice. Before he joined the goldrush the Frenchman had worked as an agricultural technician in the south of Brazil. Now, having found nothing, he was trapped in the forests of Roraima hundreds of miles from the nearest town, as destitute as the others. Here was a man who had leapt over the edge, who had abandoned comfort and certainty for a life of violent insecurity. His chances of coming out alive, solvent and healthy were slight. But I was not convinced that he had made the wrong choice.

  I cleaned my teeth, picked up my notebook, then stepped out over the mud and gravel. The temperature was rising and in the surrounding forest the racket of yelps and whistles and trills was dying away. It was now three weeks since Barbara, the Canadian woman with whom I was working, had found a way through the police cordon at Boa Vista airport, and had shoved us, unrecorded, onto a flight to the mines. It felt like months. We had watched the miners tearing out the veins of the forest: the river valleys whose sediments were paved with gold. We had seen evidence of the one-sided war some of them were waging against the local Yanomami people, and the physical and cultural collapse of the communities they had invaded. We had heard the gunfire that came from the woods every night, as bandits waylaid the miners, thieves were executed, or men who had struck lucky fought over the gold they had found. In the six months since the main rush began here, 1,700 of the 40,000 miners had been shot dead. Fifteen per cent of the Yanomami had died of disease.

  Now, because of the international scandal the invasion had caused, the new Brazilian government was clearing the mines, and moving the miners into enclaves in other parts of the Yanomami’s land. From there, they knew, they could re-invade their old claims as soon as the rest of the world lost interest. The federal police had cut the supply lines: no planes had landed on the dirt airstrips for several days. The miners were using the last of their diesel and preparing to move. The police were supposed to have arrived the previous day, to confiscate weapons in advance of the expulsions, and the men had spent the morning moving in and out of the forest, burying their guns in plastic sheeting. I had stayed to watch, but the police had not come. Barbara had–Jesus, where the hell was Barbara?

  She had set off yesterday to find a Yanomami village in the mountains and said she would be back that night. But no one had seen her. I cast around, through the shanties and bars the miners had erected, among the groups of men in the bottom of the pits, without success. I found my friend Paulo, a mechanic who had defended the indigenous people in arguments with the other miners, and we struck up the valley to look for her. The river ran orange and dead, choked by the forest clay disturbed by the mines. Around it, the valley was a wasteland of pits, spoil heaps and toppled trees. The miners who worked a stake called Junior Blefé told us that Barbara had passed through the previous day but had not returned. A man with a drinker’s face and a black eye knew how to find the village and agreed to guide us. We set off, running, into the mountains.

  Soon after we entered the darkness of the forest we began to find the prints of Barbara’s plimsolls, a day old, overlain by the naked tracks of the Yanomami. I kept my eyes on the ground, but every so often Paulo would stop and shout. ‘Look at that water, look at those trees: so beautiful, isn’t that beautiful?’ I would stand and gaze for a moment, and see trees weighed down above clear water by moss and epiphytes, damselflies pausing in spots of light.

  We ran on, following Barbara’s footprints, slipping on the clay path. By midday we started to climb steeply; my breath came as if drawn through a sheet. Soon I saw light ahead of us: we were reaching the top of a mountain. From its crest we saw women on the far side of the valley, dressed only in loincloths, moving through banana groves, carrying baskets of fruit. Hills stepped away into silence, forested, undisturbed. We remained hidden among the trees for a few minutes, then we walked down to the lap of the valley and up into the gardens, calling out in Portuguese that we were friends. They stood still and watched us come close. I put out my hands and they shook them with shy grins.

  ‘White woman,’ I said. ‘Have you seen the white woman?’ I mimed Barbara’s height and long hair.

  They laughed and pointed up the slope behind them, into the forest. We began to run again, over the mountain and down into the next valley. We stumbled, exhausted, along the valley floor, tripping on roots, blundering into trees. We turned a corner of the path and stopped.

  In the glade beside a stream a crowd of people sat or knelt, the honey of their skins cooled by the stained-glass light of the forest. The women wore feathers in their ears, the painted spots and stripes of wildcats; and jaguar’s whiskers: stems of dried grass piercing their noses and cheeks. In the middle of the circle, radiant as a flower in the green dark of the forest, was Barbara.

  She turned and smiled. ‘Glad you could make it.’

  The young Yanomami people led us along the path until we came to their malocas: round communal houses thatched almost to the ground with palm leaves. I took off my shirt and shoes–everyone else was nearly naked–and sat down. Children clustered around me, grinning and giggling, hiding their faces when I looked at them. They tugged at the hairs in my armpits: the Yanomami do not possess them. Someone gave me a plug of green leaves, and when I pushed it under my lip and sucked I forgot that I was hungry.

  A young man came through the crowd and gestured that I was to help them build an extension to the communal maloca: they wanted me to climb to the top of the roof and tie on a tarpaulin they had been given by the miners. I stayed on the roof for a couple of hours, mending holes under his direction. When I came down I asked Barbara why he was so bossy.

  ‘He’s the chief,’ she said.

  ‘But he’s only eighteen.’

  She looked around. ‘All the older
men are dying or dead.’

  In the living space of the maloca, the hammocks were filled with the sick. As I sat beside a feverish boy, two old women broke through the screen of banana leaves, shuffling on their haunches, roaring and sweeping sticks across the ground, their eyes screwed shut. I was hit on the ankles before I could get out of the way. The women stamped around the hammock, screaming, beating the air with their sticks.

  The roaring continued for most of the day. I was later told that female faith healers were almost unknown among the Yanomami: only the absence of men could account for it. The old women led me to the hammock of a teenaged girl and showed me what I must do. I stamped and shouted, sweeping my arms through the air, scooping something from the surface of her body and pushing it away from the maloca. Urged on by the two women, I danced and yelled faster and louder, stamping and leaping over the hammock, until I almost fainted and fell into the arms of the healers.

  When I had recovered and washed in the stream, the women brought me food laid out on a banana leaf: baked plantains, toadstools and beetle grubs, foetally curled, still writhing. My hand hovered over the leaf. ‘Go on,’ they gestured. I picked up a grub and opened my mouth.