It is only August but by the time we’d read Chapter 6 we knew this was our best read of 2015.
George Monbiot, @GeorgeMonbiot, describes wild Britain through the urgency of his own “wild-yearning”. He transcribes his observations with enthusiasm and a raw immediacy: “The berries of the hawthorn exuded from the woods like specks of blood.” Neither of us grew up in the UK, we were beyond lucky to experience living with access to wild, biodiverse landscapes. The book reiterated our perceptions of how tamed, clipped and subdued British flora and fauna is – Monbiot does not beat about the bush, he declares our landscape sheep-wrecked, in which we are all implicit through our tax payments redistributed as subsidies and our atrophied and limited expectations of what a wild Britain should be. His book holds a stethoscope up for us indoor types to perceive the waning ebb of the wilderness that would and could burgeon again if given the chance. He challenges our compartmentalised perception, as weekend eco-tourists, of the other-worldliness of wilderness and shows us it is our arena, yours and your childrens'.
We were aware of the lost woodlands and megafauna of London, our adopted home city. We remember seeing models showing the prehistoric/pre-industrial deforestation of the area and exhibits such as the 60 000 year old tooth of the Old Baily rhino* on visits to the Museum of London in the early 1990s. We’d seen for ourselves the wolf head on the Aldgate Pump, supposedly marking the last wolf slain in the City of London. However we were intrigued to learn about trophic cascades, where the life cycles of animals at the top of the trophic pyramid can have deep reaching implications in the composition and chemistry of soil, the atmosphere and oceans. We were intrigued to learn of the vestigial adaptations of Britain’s trees to prehistoric megafauna. We learnt that the actions of megafauna impact the distribution of vegetation and thereby rivers and watershed systems – the science is easy to comprehend, it is common sense and should be common knowledge.
Monbiot calls for the rewilding of Britain, he proposes an inclusive model where the minority echelon of landowners should be held more accountable for their stewardship and management of land that is essentially the nation’s natural heritage and future security against climate change and loss of biodiversity. He suggests changes be made to the criteria of farm subsidies so our money can be used to future-proof our nation's ecology. He advocates a forward-looking, effective plan for the reforestation of uplands, the reintroduction of megafauna such as boar, lynx, wolf and badger (we’d like to see more raptors please) to allow ecological processes to do their own thing. He advocates that the conservation of some protected natural areas be less managed to facilitate the reintroduction of megafauna. We cannot agree more, after all how can we expect other developing nations to safeguard their megafauna and biodiverse habitats from man-made eco-disasters such as palm oil farming when we’ve eradicated our own and won’t make restorations?
We’ve not stopped talking about the book nor thinking about Rewilding since we turned the last page. We have started by re-evaluating the ways we manage our own tiny scrap of garden as fragment of a wider ecosystem. We have put more effort into being more informed about the way our local green spaces are managed and take a wider interest in national issues.
Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life George Monbiot ISBN-13: 978-0141975580 Publisher: Penguin (5 Jun. 2014)
In addendum: Wild Beasts of Prehistoric London , james read, guest Museum of London Blog author, 24 Sep 2015
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