Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life

342 Pages·2014·0.878 MB·English

by  George Monbiot, George Monbiot

Praise for Feral
“Drawing on a life of rich observation and experience, George Mon-
biot regales us with stories of life’s astonishing capacity for renewal
and offers an uplifting and inspiring goal beyond the cessation of our
destructive rampage—the restoration of the wild in nature and our
own lives.” —David Suzuki
“It could not be more rigorously researched, more elegantly delivered,
or more timely. We need such big thinking for our own sakes and
those of our children. Bring on the wolves and whales, I say, and, in
the words of Maurice Sendak, let the wild rumpus start.”
—Philip Hoare, Sunday Telegraph
“The world knows George Monbiot mostly from his powerful and
perceptive journalism. But this is a whole different order of writing
and thinking, a primal account of an unstifled world.”
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Eaarth
“Monbiot is a proper reporting journalist, he can write, and he stands
for something—which puts him, these days, well ahead of most of our
tribe. Plus, this peculiar and involving book—three-quarters exhila-
rating environmental manifesto, one quarter midlife crisis—has an
enormous amount to recommend it. . . . Extraordinarily good and
crunchy material. . . . There’s a lot here to digest and think about,
much to be excited by.” —The Spectator
“A highly analytical and richly researched book.” —Maclean’s
“In this remarkable book, the journalist and environmentalist George
Monbiot explores projects where this ‘incendiary idea’ has been put
into practice. The results are extraordinary. . . . Most impressive about
Feral is its focus on finding constructive solutions to ecological
problems.” —Sunday Times
“Monbiot’s book is wadded full with stories and facts aplenty, but the
quality that most endures are his descriptions of the bigger world. . . .
The tangible, almost perfume-heavy descriptions of the landscape and
the creatures that inhabit them are wondrous and dream-like. Cine-
matic.” —The Tyee
“Feral has really opened my mind to the history and possibilities of
our landscape. It reflects a very real need in us all right now to be
released from our claustrophobic monoculture and sense of power-
lessness. To break the straight lines into endless branches. To free our
land from its absent administrators. To rewild both the landscape and
ourselves. It is the most positive and daring environmental book I
have read. In order to change our world you have to be able to see a
better one. I think George has done that.” —Thom Yorke of
Radiohead
“A fun bit of investigative journalism. . . . [Monbiot] is a gifted nature
writer.” —Toronto Star
“Monbiot has the visionary polemicist’s gift of pursuing an argument
by gentle stages to a dazzlingly aspirational conclusion. His accounts
of the ecological horrors perpetrated by sheep and the perverse
defence of their depredations by assorted conservation bodies are not
just persuasive but powerfully affecting. He is brilliant, too, at pre-
senting statistics in readable form, and on the adroitly irrefutable
deployment of ancient historical evidence. . . . Something about the
charm and persistence of Monbiot’s argument has the hypnotic effect
of a stoat beguiling a hapless rabbit. Soon you find yourself dazedly
agreeing that it’s all a tremendous idea.” —New Statesman
“To read this seminal, subversive, sometimes intoxicating book could
mean never to look at our landscape in quite the same way again. . . .
Feral belongs on the shelf with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey, Robert
Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie and other fine writers who have engaged
in the human reunion with nature.” —The Irish Times
“Monbiot’s latest book stands in a long tradition of back-to-nature
narratives, the most famous of which is Thoreau’s Walden. It is also,
at one level at least, a mid-life crisis memoir. However, Feral is both
more original and more important than such a description would sug-
gest. . . . Wolves, he tells us, are ‘necessary monsters of the mind’;
perhaps the same could be said of Monbiot himself.”
—The Independent
“There’s nothing ignoble about Monbiot’s vision of reinstating eco-
systems in which man’s power to dominate is consciously withheld. It
is a vision fed by his growing disenchantment with the landscape that
surrounds him. . . . Rewilding along the lines Monbiot advocates
becomes an attractive proposal, a hopeful metaphor for something
over nothing.” —The Guardian
“Part personal journal, part rigorous (and riveting) natural history,
but above all unbridled vision for a less cowed, more self-willed
planet, this is a book that will change the way you think about the
natural world, and your place in it. Big, bold and beautifully written,
his vision of a rewilded world is, well, truly captivating.”
—Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, celebrity chef
and author of The River Cottage Cookbook
“A Book of Revelations for our times. It warns us in no uncertain
terms that if we don’t change our ways in the hell of a hurry, we’ll
have done two other things: 1) Committed the ultimate crime of bio-
cide; and 2) Hanged ourselves in the process thereof. Read Feral and
act . . . or else.”
—Farley Mowat, author of Sea of Slaughter
and Never Cry Wolf
“George Monbiot is always original—both in the intelligence of his
opinions and the depth and rigour of his research. In this unusual
book he presents a persuasive argument for a new future for the
planet, one in which we consciously progress from just conserving
nature to actively rebuilding it.” —Brian Eno

George Monbiot
Feral
Rewilding the Land, the Sea
and Human Life
the university of chicago press • chicago
george monbiot studied zoology at Oxford, but his real education
began when he travelled to Brazil in his twenties and joined the resistance
movement defending the land of indigenous peasants. Since then he has spent
his career as a journalist and environmentalist, working with others to defend
the natural world he loves. His celebrated Guardian columns are syndicated all
over the world. Monbiot is the author of the books Captive State, The Age of
Consent, Bring on the Apocalypse, and Heat, as well as the investigative travel
books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed, and No Man’s Land. Among the
many prizes he has won is the UN Global 500 award for outstanding
environmental achievement, presented to him by Nelson Mandela.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by George Monbiot
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20555-7 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-20569-4 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226205694.001.0001
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Monbiot, George, 1963– author.
Feral : rewilding the land, the sea, and human life / George Monbiot.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-226-20555-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-
20569-4 (e-book) 1. Wildlife reintroduction. 2. Restoration ecology. I. Title.
QL83.4.M66 2014
639.97’9—dc23
2014013971
¥ This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
To Rebecca, Hanna and Martha
With all my love
And in memory of Morgan Parry,
an honest man
Feral: ‘in a wild state, especially after escape
from captivity or domestication’
Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction xvii
1. Raucous Summer 1
2. The Wild Hunt 14
3. Foreshadowings 23
4. Elopement 40
5. The Never- spotted Leopard 49
6. Greening the Desert 62
7. Bring Back the Wolf 90
8. A Work of Hope 121
9. Sheepwrecked 153
10. The Hushings 167
11. The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) 186
12. The Conservation Prison 209
13. Rewilding the Sea 228
14. The Gifts of the Sea 258
15. Last Light 267
Notes 269
Index 303