Feral

by George Monbiot

  Surely, though, lamb is not produced to feed the farmers, but for sale to outsiders for the enhancement and enrichment of their lives. Changing the use of the land but not its ownership does not alter this relationship. But expropriation and dispossession of the kind deployed by the foresters, the reservoir builders and the army is a different matter. I would oppose any proposal to wrest land out of the hands of farmers for the purpose of rewilding. If rewilding is to happen, it must do so with the consent and involvement of those who currently work there.

  But none of this is to dismiss the core argument which he and Delyth made so powerfully, and with which I find myself strongly in sympathy. They see rewilding as completing the long process of economic change and exclusion that has been erasing them and their culture from the land.

  I found myself tumbling into cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable state of mind that results from an inability to resolve conflicting ideas or values. I was unable to deny either position, yet each was exclusive of the other: I could not simultaneously support rewilding and the restoration of the ecosystem and support efforts to sustain the sheep farming that kept Dafydd, Delyth and their culture alive. I saw destruction and sadness in both directions. That is the sorry state in which I remained for several weeks.

  Then, walking up the hill behind my house one morning, past a rare stand of birches that has recolonized a patch of rough grazing, the answer struck me. It was so simple, so obvious that I could not understand why I had failed to see it before.

  As I mentioned earlier, sheep farmers in the Welsh hills receive an average of £53,000 a year in subsidies while their average net farm income is £33,000. Keeping livestock, in other words, costs them £20,000 a year, though this gap may diminish if the price of lamb continues to rise. But, under the Common Agricultural Policy, if you want your subsidy payment, one of the few things you are forbidden to do is nothing. The Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition rules specify that if you do not keep the land clear, you forfeit everything. There is no requirement to produce anything; you must merely stop the land from reverting to nature, by either ploughing it, grazing it or simply cutting the resurgent vegetation. The purpose is to prevent the restoration of the ecosystem.

  So here, perhaps, is the resolution of the conundrum that caused me such trouble: this rule should be dropped. Those farmers who are in it only for the money would quickly discover that they would earn more by lying on a beach than by chasing sheep over rain-sodden hills. Those who, like Dafydd and Delyth, believe in what they are doing, and have wider aims than just the maximization of profit, would keep farming. Where the life and community associated with raising sheep are highly valued, farming will continue. Where they are not, it will stop. Large areas of land would be rewilded, and the farmers who owned it could receive, as well as their main payments, genuinely green subsidies for the planting, reintroductions and other tasks required to permit a functioning ecosystem to recover. The alternative is the system we have at present: compulsory farming, enforced by the subsidy regime.

  There is, I think, a necessary refinement of this simple idea. At present the subsidy system is deeply regressive. While it is funded by the taxes extracted from everyone, rich and poor, the money is disproportionately harvested by the biggest landowners. This, under the current system, is inevitable, as farmers are paid according to their acreage. According to Kevin Cahill, the author of Who Owns Britain, 69 per cent of the land here is owned by 0.6 per cent of the population.13 It is profoundly wrong, I believe, that people struggling to support their families should be forced to extend alms to dukes, sheikhs and sharks: the absentee landlords, speculators and assorted millionaires who own much of the farmland of Britain and other parts of Europe.

  To address this injustice, I would like to see the European Union introduce a maximum entitlement for the main subsidy payment.*4 I would suggest that no more than 100 hectares owned by a farmer, business or trust be eligible for this money. This would save a great deal of public funds while giving small farms (which are more labour-intensive) an advantage over the large ones. It could help to reverse the growing concentration of land ownership.

  In renegotiating the Common Agricultural Policy, which governs the payment of subsidies, the Westminster government argued against any such cap, on the grounds that it would discourage ‘consolidation’ which, it says, enhances competitiveness.14 In other words, the government wishes to see a greater concentration of ownership.

  Dafydd points out that removing the obligation on landowners to farm their land could make ownership attractive to absentees, pushing up the price and squeezing farmers out of the market. This is a genuine danger, though it has very different consequences for the farmers who own their land (and could benefit from rising prices) and those who rent their land and might wish to exercise their right to buy it.

  But the current subsidy system exerts the same effect: artificially inflating the price of land at the expense of tenants and new entrants (people who want to become farmers). It is hard to conceive of a subsidy system which would do otherwise: if there are to be farm payments of any description, they will cause the price of land to rise. The imposition of a cap would counteract this to some extent, making the land and the money to be harvested from it less attractive to the very rich.

  These suggestions are ambitious. But something has to change. Economically, politically and ecologically, the current subsidy system is unsustainable. Eventually, all over Europe, it will break. We should prepare ourselves for this moment by developing a clear alternative. Far from being coercive, removing the abandonment rule would do nothing but enhance farmers’ freedom of action, or freedom of inaction. Taxpayers would no longer find themselves obliged to fund just one vision of how the countryside develops. We would be paying for nature in some places, culture in others, and, except for sites of particular ecological importance, there is no need for anyone to specify where those places would be.

  The farmers’ freedom would create the space for other people’s. Where they decide to stop cutting or grazing or burning their land, change could happen very quickly. Land which now supports the barest remnants of life, which is silent but for the wind and the sheep, would (with a little help at the beginning) soon become recolonized by trees and birds and insects, as Ritchie had discovered in one of the least auspicious corners of the Cambrian Desert. As the returning ecosystem developed, some places would revert to deep forest, others, at first, to gorse and heath, others to carr: bog forest dominated by alders or willows or aspens. If we could then begin to reintroduce missing species–the large mammals absent for so long from these hills–places which nurture almost nothing but crows and tormentil could become as rich in life as some of the world’s most famous national parks.

  People as well as wildlife could regain a footing on the land. Tracts which have been reduced to a repellent bleakness, where there is no living structure, no natural shelter, could again exhilarate and entrance. Where there was little but brown grass before, where the exploration and discovery of nature end almost as soon as they begin, ecosystems could flourish which again beguile both children and adults, which offer endless adventures of revelation and surprise. I hope that at least some of these rewilded places will be big enough to prove uncrossable in one day’s walk. A sense of boundlessness is something whose absence afflicts many rich nations. When, after half an hour walking across a wood, I reach the fence that separates it from the surrounding fields, I feel that something which was just beginning–a deep abstraction–is prematurely truncated. The discovery and wonder, the freedom from structured thought which had begun to open my mind come to an abrupt end.

  In some parts of the world tumultuous nature is already returning to places from which it had been banished. One estimate suggests that two-thirds of those parts of the United States which were once forested, then cleared, have become forested again, as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country.15 Another proposes that b
y 2030, even without any change in the subsidy regime, farmers on the European continent (though not in Britain, where no major shift is expected) will vacate around 30 million hectares of land, an area roughly the size of Poland.16 This is not the result of any policy or plan; in fact, some European governments are trying very hard to stop it from happening and to keep farmers on the land. But as young people leave to find jobs and adventure elsewhere and no one is prepared to take their place, the decline of farming in many parts becomes inevitable.

  There is a sadness here, which I felt while walking in the Ardèche in southern France, and finding, like Mayan ruins in the jungle, exquisitely built stone terraces, flagged paths, ancient bridges and stone stairways now overwhelmed by chestnut forests–growing sometimes from the very walls–through which sounders of boar marauded and pine martens leapt. My delight in the resurgent wildlife was tempered by the shock of seeing that work, laid down hand upon hand by untold generations, whose people–like Dafydd and his roof–had built a future for descendants they would never meet, gone all to waste. A civilization had been erased.

  The process of retreat, with its mingled griefs and joys, appears in many places, particularly the uplands of Europe, to be inexorable. Unless farmers and their children are to be forced to remain on the land, there is no option but to acknowledge it and then to decide what happens next. The areas farmers will vacate might be large enough, if the people of this continent so choose, to permit the reintroduction not just of the wolves, bears, lynx and bison which are gradually regaining their footing on the land, but also of elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, lions and hyenas.

  Does that sound ridiculous? I am sure it does. It is fair to say that the people of Europe are not yet ready for it. But if there is sufficient land, if that land is concentrated in large enough blocks and protected from further exploitation, there are likely to be few biological impediments. All these animals (or those of related species) ranged across Europe until recently, and our native fauna and flora have evolved to survive their attentions. The barriers, of course, would be political and cultural. But as the remarkable change in attitudes towards the wolf in many parts of Europe demonstrates, this might not always be so. Perhaps one day big cats will no longer need to be imagined.

  As nature retreats from other parts of the world, Europe, the first continent to lose its megafauna and much of its mesofauna (the middle-sized animals), could, through rewilding, become one of the most biologically wealthy regions on earth. The story we have missed, while rightly lamenting the shocking collapse of biodiversity in so many countries, is that we could be about to witness a raucous European summer.

  11

  The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild)

  And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.

  And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans

  And never miss them.

  Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!

  D. H. Lawrence

  Mountain Lion

  Four Czech skinheads, dressed in black muscle shirts and combat trousers, eyes glittering, jabbed their fingers at the weapons and talked in low, intense tones. They strained with anger and excitement. For them, it seemed, the war deemed to have finished almost a century ago was not yet over. Here, 600,000 men had died in the First World War, on a front now largely forgotten in northern Europe–the Soška fronta–where soldiers of the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies faced each other in conditions as brutal and lethal as those on the Somme, along the Soča valley and over the mountains, in some cases across a few metres of bare peak, in trenches hacked into rock and ice.

  Walking in the Julian Alps, we had followed the old supply lines, seen concrete emplacements and stopped at the remains of cable stations which were used to haul equipment from one peak to another. As we passed other hikers in bright colours, with friendly greetings in a dozen languages, watched the ibex placidly chewing the cud in the high mountain pastures and fed the choughs on scraps of cheese, the horrors of that front were unimaginable. But here in the Kobarid Museum, the cases, the maps and panels began to make sense of what we had seen, and of the astonishing scale of the slaughter.

  But as the skinheads hissed and whistled and clenched their teeth while they pored over the faded photographs, my partner pointed to something I had missed. As soon as she did so, I was riveted. Most of the panels showed the same thing, regardless of whether the photographs were taken from high in the mountains or down in the valleys. I looked past the coils of wire, the set faces of the men, the guns and horses, and locked onto something astonishing. Something that wasn’t there.

  I stepped out into the sunlight, scarcely able to believe what I had seen–or what I had not. I stared at the hills around me, contrasting them with the photographs. Some of the pictures had been taken here or in other places we knew, including the section of the Soča valley in which we were staying. Yet, where dense forests now grew, forming a high, closed canopy–in the valleys, over the hills and up the mountain walls until they shrank, many thousands of feet above sea level, into a low scrub of pines, which diminished further to a natural treeline–there had been almost nothing. The land in the photographs, taken on the western side of Slovenia during the First World War, was almost treeless.

  When I say that a country is the size of Wales, I do not expect you to take that statement seriously. Wales is used as a comparison so often that it has almost become a unit of measurement. How many times have you read that ‘an area of rainforest the size of Wales has been destroyed in the Amazon this year’ or ‘the floods have drowned a region the size of Wales’, or ‘the rescue services must search an area of bush the size of Wales’? But in this rare case, the comparison is not a loose one: they are almost identical in size.*1 Slovenia’s population (2 million) is slightly smaller than that of Wales (3 million) and its gross domestic product, during the year before our visit, a fraction higher.†2 There the resemblances end.

  While the uplands of Wales have been progressively deforested over the past century, the vegetation of the hills and mountains of Slovenia has shifted in the same period from grassland and scrub to deep forest. So tall and impressive are the trees and so thickly do they now cover the hills that when you see the old wartime photos–taken, in ecological terms, such a short time ago–it is almost impossible to believe that you are looking at the same place. I have become so used to seeing the progress of destruction that scanning those photographs felt like watching a film played backwards.

  We slid the raft down the bank, into the shallow water beneath an overhanging beech tree. The ripples it made rocked across the smooth water, furling up then laying out the early autumn colours–green, ginger, yellow, blue–like a roll of psychedelic linoleum. We slipped into the boat, paddled out into the middle of the river then stowed the oars. As soon as the raft felt the current it began to turn, like a fallen leaf, and to drift down the river. Neither of us said a word.

  On the left, Slovenia glided past us; on the right, Croatia. Both were cloaked in deep forest. Beech, maple and aspen overhung the water and trailed their twigs in the current. On the steep limestone hills on either side of the River Kolpa, silver firs broke through the canopy of deciduous trees. Birdsong poured from the woods and rolled across the water. Otherwise, but for an occasional car passing along the narrow road on the Slovenian side and the distant rumble of a weir, there was no sound.

  I lay back in the boat. The river and the sky were fringed by leaves. Around the sallows beside the water, redstarts and wagtails flickered through the mottled sunlight. A thrush passed across the river of sky above us, its wings a silver gauze against the light.

  Soon the current picked up, and the first weir came into sight. To give ourselves time to inspect it before we went over, we pushed the boat onto a gravel spit.

  Though it could not be so, it looked as if no human had ever trodden there. On the upstr
eam end of the spit the smell of peppermint was so strong that I fancied I could almost see the trails of scent hanging above the bushes. It formed a hedge, waist high, that released a cloud of insects as I brushed through it. The far end of the spit, which had built up against the weir, was covered by a thicket of willow. Pushing through, I found a disused duck’s nest. Warblers flitted among the branches. I struggled across to the far side, where woody nightshade hung over a derelict mill stream. Yellow stamens protruded from the dark flowers like stings. In the stream, brown trout with red and black stipples rose to kiss the surface. I watched them for a while, then pushed back through the withies to the other side of the bar, where we stared at the water sliding slickly over the lip of the rocks, before exploding into feathers of spray.

  Above the weir the water looked stretched, its polished surface scarred by turbulence. More trout hung beneath it, resting their tails on the rebounding water above the rocks, eyeing the caddis flies that struggled to break free from the surface, rising and snatching them with a white flash of the mouth. The dents they made on the surface smeared over the sill.

  Hearing the water crepitate along the gravel bar, watching the autumn leaves slide down towards the weir and the white water crashing over it, I thought of the reindeer carving that I loved in the British Museum. A stag and hind are struggling south across a rushing river, following the autumn herds migrating to their winter pastures. The stag has propped his chin on the hind’s rump as he paddles, nostrils flared, antlers thrown back, eyes popping with effort and arousal. You can almost hear the reindeer snorting and panting, see the water lapping round their chins, dragging down their long winter coats. All this is rendered in a piece of mammoth ivory the size of a carrot, carved with a chip of flint 13,000 years ago.

  We negotiated the weir in a fashion that I would struggle to describe as graceful: backwards, in a tangle of limbs and paddles. The judges who reside in my head held up their zeros.