Feral

by George Monbiot

  I leant on my spade, staring at the ground. On that raw December day soon after I had arrived in Wales, I was struck by the smallness of this life. Somehow–I am not quite sure how it happened–I had found myself living a life in which loading the dishwasher presented an interesting challenge.

  The invasion of Roraima, which I had witnessed almost twenty years before, represents everything I hate. The miners, many of whom had been expelled from their own lands in the north-east of Brazil by businessmen and corrupt officials, were driven to the mines by poverty and desperation. But those who had organized it, who had the capital to build the airstrips and buy the machinery, were driven to kill and destroy by greed. Had the government of Brazil not changed, had the miners not, after several more months of procrastination, been expelled from the Yanomami’s land, the tribe would have gone the same way as most of those in the Americas: to extinction. The old government knew this. Genocide was not its intention: simply an unavoidable, and unregretted, consequence of its policy.

  And yet, even while I stayed in the goldmines and experienced the horrors of the invasion, I was drawn to what I hated. The mines exploded the metaphors by which we live. In the rich nations we trade in ciphers for gold, and seek them through specializations so extreme that we are in danger of losing many of our faculties. In the mines gold was gold, and the men got their hands dirty in all respects. Conflicts were resolved not through legal instruments or on the sofas of television studios, but by shoot-outs in the forest. It was rawer, wilder, more engaging than the life I had led; and the life I would lead thereafter.

  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.’1 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. We find ourselves hedged by the consequences of our nature, living meekly for fear of provoking or damaging others. ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’2

  Much of the social history of the past two centuries consists of the discovery, often grudging, that other people, whatever their language, colour, religion or culture, have similar needs and desires to ours. As mass communication has enabled those whose rights we formerly disregarded to speak for themselves, to explain the impacts on their lives of the decisions we make, we become increasingly constrained by a necessary regard for others. Just as potently, we now know that little we do is without environmental consequence. The amplification of our lives by technology grants us a power over the natural world which we can no longer afford to use. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live as if there were no tomorrow.

  There are powerful and growing movements in many nations of people who refuse to accept these constraints. They rebel against taxes, health and safety laws, the regulation of business, restrictions on smoking, speeding and guns, above all against environmental limits. Like the people who promoted the invasion of the Yanomami’s lands, they kick against the prohibitive decencies we owe to others. They insist that they may swing their fists regardless of whose nose is in the way, almost as if it were a human right.

  I have no desire to join these people. I accept the need for limitations, for a life of restraint and sublimation. But I realized, on that grey day in Wales, that I could not continue to live as I had done. I could not continue just sitting and writing, looking after my daughter and my house, running merely to stay fit, pursuing only what could not be seen, watching the seasons cycling past without ever quite belonging to them. I had offered too little to that life, the life of the spirit,

  Which is not to be found in our obituaries

  Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

  Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

  In our empty rooms3

  I was, I believed, ecologically bored.

  I do not romanticize evolutionary time. I have already lived beyond the lifespan of most hunter-gatherers. Without farming, sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, surgery and optometry I would be dead by now. The outcome of mortal combat between me, myopically stumbling around with a stone-tipped spear, and an enraged giant aurochs is not hard to predict.

  The study of past ecosystems shows us that whenever people broke into new lands, however rudimentary their technology and small their numbers, they soon destroyed much of the wildlife–especially the larger animals–that lived there. There was no state of grace, no golden age in which people lived in harmony with nature. Neither do I wish to return to the hallows and gallows of the civilizations we have left behind.

  Nor was it authenticity I sought: I do not find that a useful or intelligible concept. Even if it exists, it is by definition impossible to reach through striving. I wanted only to satisfy my craving for a richer, rawer life than I had recently lived. Yet somehow I had to reconcile this urge with the life I could not abandon: bringing up my child, paying my mortgage, respecting the rights and needs of other people, restraining myself from damaging the natural world. It was only when I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand what I was looking for.

  So young a word, yet so many meanings! By the time ‘rewilding’ entered the dictionary, in 2011,4 it was already hotly contested. When it was first formulated, it meant releasing captive animals into the wild. Soon the definition expanded to describe the reintroduction of animal and plant species to habitats from which they had been excised. Some people began using it to mean the rehabilitation not just of particular species, but of entire ecosystems: a restoration of wilderness. Anarcho-primitivists then applied the word to human life, proposing a wilding of people and their cultures. The two definitions of interest to me, however, differ slightly from all of these.

  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. In countries such as my own, the conservation movement, while well intentioned, has sought to freeze living systems in time. It attempts to prevent animals and plants from either leaving or–if they do not live there already–entering. It seeks to manage nature as if tending a garden. Many of the ecosystems, such as heath and moorland, blanket bog and rough grass, that it tries to preserve are dominated by the low, scrubby vegetation which remains after forests have been repeatedly cleared and burnt. This vegetation is cherished by wildlife groups, which prevent it from reverting to woodland through intensive grazing by sheep, cattle and horses. It is as if conservationists in the Amazon had decided to protect the cattle ranches, rather than the rainforest.

  Rewilding recognizes that nature consists not just of a collection of species but also of their ever-shifting relationships with each other and with the physical environment. It understands that to keep an ecosystem in a state of arrested development, to preserve it as if it were a jar of pickles, is to protect something which bears little relationship to the natural world. This perspective has been influenced by some of the most arresting scientific developments of recent times.

  Over the past few decades, ecologists have discovered the existence of widespread trophic cascades. These are processes caused by animals at the top of the food chain, which tumble all the way to the bottom. Predators and large herbivores can transform the places in which they live. In some cases they have changed not only the ecosystem but also the nature of the soil, the behaviour of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans and even the composition of the atmosphere. These findings suggest that the natural world is composed of even more fascinating and complex systems than we had imagined. They alter our understanding of how ecosystems function and present a radical challenge to some models of conservation. They make a powerful case for the reintroduction of large predators and other mi
ssing species.

  While researching this book I have, with the help of the visionary forester Adam Thorogood, stumbled across an incendiary idea that seems to have been discussed nowhere but in a throwaway line in one scientific paper.5 I hope it might prompt a reassessment of how our ecosystems function, and of the extent to which they are perceived as natural. There is, we believe, powerful circumstantial evidence suggesting that many of our familiar European trees and shrubs have evolved to resist attacks by elephants. The straight-tusked elephant, related to the species that still lives in Asia today, persisted in Europe until around 40,000 years ago,6 a mere tick of evolution’s clock. It was, most likely, hunted to extinction. If the evidence is as compelling as it seems, it suggests that this species dominated the temperate regions of Europe. Our ecosystems appear to be elephant-adapted.

  Even so, I have no desire to try to re-create the landscapes or ecosystems that existed in the past, to reconstruct–as if that were possible–primordial wilderness. Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way. It involves reintroducing absent plants and animals (and in a few cases culling exotic species which cannot be contained by native wildlife), pulling down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, but otherwise stepping back. At sea, it means excluding commercial fishing and other forms of exploitation. The ecosystems that result are best described not as wilderness, but as self-willed: governed not by human management but by their own processes.* Rewilding has no end points, no view about what a ‘right’ ecosystem or a ‘right’ assemblage of species looks like. It does not strive to produce a heath, a meadow, a rainforest, a kelp garden or a coral reef. It lets nature decide.

  The ecosystems that will emerge, in our changed climates, on our depleted soils, will not be the same as those which prevailed in the past. The way they evolve cannot be predicted, which is one of the reasons why this project enthralls. While conservation often looks to the past, rewilding of this kind looks to the future.

  The rewilding of both land and sea could produce ecosystems, even in such depleted regions as Britain and northern Europe, as profuse and captivating as those that people now travel halfway around the world to see. One of my hopes is that it makes magnificent wildlife accessible to everyone.

  I mentioned that there are two definitions of rewilding that interest me. The second is the rewilding of human life. While some primitivists see a conflict between the civilized and the wild, the rewilding I envisage has nothing to do with shedding civilization. We can, I believe, enjoy the benefits of advanced technology while also enjoying, if we choose, a life richer in adventure and surprise. Rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it. It is to ‘love not man the less, but Nature more’.8

  The consequences of abandoning a sophisticated economy, supported by high crop yields, would be catastrophic. Before farming began in Britain, for example, these islands appear to have supported a maximum of 5,000 people.9 Had they been evenly dispersed, each person would have occupied 54 square kilometres, an area slightly larger than the city of Southampton (which now houses 240,000 souls).10 This, it seems, was as many people as hunting and gathering could sustain. (Even so, Mesolithic men and women severely reduced the numbers of large animals.) The fantasy entertained by some of the primitivists I have met, of returning to a hunter-gatherer economy, would first require the elimination of almost all human beings.

  For the same reason I do not think that extensive rewilding should take place on productive land. It is better deployed in the places–especially in the uplands–in which production is so low that farming continues only as a result of the taxpayer’s generosity. As essential services all over Europe (and in several other parts of the world) are cut through want of funds, farm subsidies in their current form surely cannot last much longer. Without them, it is hard to see how farming in these places can be sustained: for good or ill, it will gradually withdraw from the hills.

  Some people see rewilding as a human retreat from nature; I see it as a re-involvement. I would like to see the reintroduction into the wild not only of wolves, lynx, wolverines, beavers, boar, moose, bison and–perhaps one day in the distant future–elephants and other species, but also of human beings. In other words, I see rewilding as an enhanced opportunity for people to engage with and delight in the natural world.

  Feral also examines the lives we may no longer lead and the constraints–many of them necessary–that prevent us from exercising some of our neglected faculties. It explains how I have sought, within these constraints, to rewild my own life, to escape from ecological boredom. I am surely not alone in possessing an unmet need for a wilder life, and I suggest that this need might have caused a remarkable collective delusion, from which many thousands of people now suffer, that seems to be an almost perfect encapsulation of the desire for a fiercer, less predictable ecosystem.

  If you are content with the scope of your life, if it is already as colourful and surprising as you might wish, if feeding the ducks is as close as you ever want to come to nature, this book is probably not for you. But if, like me, you sometimes feel that you are scratching at the walls of this life, hoping to find a way into a wider space beyond, then you may discover something here that resonates. I seek to challenge our perceptions of our place in the world, of its ecosystems and of the means by which we might connect with them.

  In doing so, I hope to encourage a positive environmentalism. The treatment of the earth’s living systems in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been characterized by destruction and degradation. Environmentalists, in seeking to arrest this carnage, have been clear about what people should not do. We have argued that certain freedoms–to damage, to pollute, to waste–should be limited. While there are good reasons for these injunctions, we have offered little in return. 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. We know what we are against; now we must explain what we are for.

  Using parts of Wales, Scotland, Slovenia, Poland, East Africa, North America and Brazil as its case studies of good and bad practice, 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. It foresees large areas of self-willed land and sea, repopulated by the beasts now missing from these places, in which we may freely roam.

  Perhaps most importantly, it offers hope. While rewilding should not become a substitute for protecting threatened places and species, the story it tells is that ecological change need not always proceed in the same direction. Environmentalism in the twentieth century foresaw a silent spring, in which the further degradation of the biosphere seemed inevitable. Rewilding offers the hope of a raucous summer, in which, in some parts of the world at least, destructive processes are thrown into reverse.

  Nevertheless, like all visions, rewilding must be constantly questioned and challenged. It should happen only with the consent and enthusiasm of those who work on the land. It 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, 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.

  Researching this book has been a great adventure: this is the most bewitching topic I have ever explored. It has taken me to wild places, brought me into contact with wild life and wild people. It has exposed me to some of the most riveting findings–in the fields of biology, archaeology, history and geography–I have yet encountered. It has wrought deep changes in my own life. At times investigating these issues has felt like stepping throug
h the back of the wardrobe. This story begins slowly, with my efforts to engage more fully with the ecosystems on my doorstep, to discover in them something of the untamed spirit I would like to resurrect. If you would care to push past the coats, you can join me there.

  2

  The Wild Hunt

  I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

  Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied

  John Masefield

  Sea Fever

  On the riverbank, beside the old railway bridge, I loaded my boat. I tied on a spool I had made from hazel poles, wound with orange twine and a team of tinsel lures. I lashed a bottle of water and a wooden club to the cleats on either side of my seat, and attached the paddle to the boat with a leash: anything not tied down was likely to be lost. In the pockets of my lifejacket were spare lures, swivels and weights, a chocolate bar, a knife and–in case I was stung–a cigarette lighter.

  I stepped into the brown water. It filled my diving boots, soaking into my socks. It would keep my feet warm all day. I pushed the boat into deeper water then swung myself into it and set off downstream. Two sandpipers dipped and swooped along the bank. A family of swans bow-waved up the river, struggling against the current. Soon I reached the fast sparkling water in the shallows beyond the first meander. It rose in plumes over the rocks and raced between them, breaking into manes of spray. I sped through the rapids, bouncing off the water cushions on the boulders, feeling alive and free. Then the river reached the beach and spilled in a shallow fan across it. I found a channel just deep enough to carry me, and slid down into the first wave, which swamped the kayak then let me pass. The other breakers alternately sluiced over the prow or lifted the boat to smack it down with a great shudder onto the water. I paddled hard, submerging, rising, collapsing into the troughs, pushing through the breaking waves into the rolling waters beyond.