Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life by George Monbiot – a review

Feral by George Monbiot

On ancient maps the space between the known world and terra incognita was often filled with dragons. We didn’t know much about it but we did know it was dangerous. This is Monbiot’s homeland.

In Feral (2013, Allen Lane), George Monbiot invites us to join him in this wild country inhabited by bears, wolves, elephants, lions and other megafauna. His story surfs from the personal to the global on a wave, sometimes joyously hopeful, sometimes blackly despairing. He is to be found cresting the rollers in his kayak or metaphorically floundering in the troughs where rockhopping trawlers have grubbed up the sea floor in their quest for scallops.

It is an exciting ride, an intelligent well-constructed book, full of insights, even if some of the propositions are fantastical.

Rewinding the clock

Conservation, he says, is not enough: we need to rewind the clock, to rewild, setting aside zones where nature is allowed to find her own way. Plants (particularly trees), fish, birds and animals would be reintroduced. The big question is which species belong in today’s overcrowded Britain (and around its coasts). I say Britain, but Monbiot targets Wales and Scotland. His hit list includes wild boar, bear, wolf, lynx, lion and elephant, all having lived in Britain in the past. He talks of reinstating trophic cascades (based on the idea that big animals eat smaller ones) – claiming that reintroducing megafauna predators is the best way to rebalance the out-of-kilter natural world. Our idea of nature, he says, is informed by what we saw as children, but every new generation brings a new degradation. The baseline shifts, and the next generation’s ‘nature’ is less authentic than the last one’s. Rewilding would reverse the trend.

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