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  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).

  GEORGE MONBIOT

  Feral

  Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO

  Praise for Feral

  “Drawing on a life of rich observation and experience, George Monbiot 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 exhilarating 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. Cinematic.”

  —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 powerlessness. 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 presenting 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 suggest. . . . 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 ecosystems 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 biocide; 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

  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

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction
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  1. Raucous Summer

  2. The Wild Hunt

  3. Foreshadowings

  4. Elopement

  5. The Never-spotted Leopard

  6. Greening the Desert

  7. Bring Back the Wolf

  8. A Work of Hope

  9. Sheepwrecked

  10. The Hushings

  11. The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild)

  12. The Conservation Prison

  13. Rewilding the Sea

  14. The Gifts of the Sea

  15. Last Light

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  Arrange these threats in ascending order of deadliness: wolves, vending machines, cows, domestic dogs and toothpicks. I will save you the trouble: they have been ordered already.

  The number of deaths known to have been caused by wolves in North America during the twenty-first century is one1, 2: if averaged out, that would be 0.08 per year. The average number of people killed in the US by vending machines is 2.2 (people sometimes rock them to try to extract their drinks, with predictable results).3 Cows kill some twenty people in the US,4 dogs thirty-one.5 Over the past century, swallowing toothpicks caused the deaths of around 170 Americans a year.6 Though there are sixty thousand wolves in North America, the risk of being killed by one is almost nonexistent.

  If you find that hard to believe, you are not alone, and not to blame. For centuries we have terrified ourselves with tales of the lethal threat wolves present to humankind, and the unending war being fought with equal vigor on both sides. In reality, wolves are exceedingly afraid of people and in almost all circumstances avoid us. If we take the time to win their trust—as the biologists who have been adopted by wild wolf packs can testify—they can become affectionate companions. But the fairytales are more powerful than the facts.

  Could it be that we are so afraid of wolves not because they represent an alien threat, but because we recognize in them some of our own traits? They have a similar social intelligence: the ability to interpret and respond to someone else’s behavior and mood. They look at you as if they can read your mind. To some extent they can, which is why we domesticated them. This, perhaps, is why they unnerve us, and why so many stories have been written and filmed in which wolves become humans or disguise themselves as such, or humans become wolves.

  But perhaps there is something else at work too, a subliminal yearning for the kind of danger that no longer infects our lives. Discovery Channel’s very popular series Yukon Men is as accurate a description of the world as the tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. It claims that ‘there have been twenty fatal wolf attacks in the last ten years.’7 This would be wrong under any circumstances, but the strong implication is that all these attacks have taken place in and around the town of Tanana. This town, the series tells us, ‘is under siege by hungry predators . . . there’s always somebody that’s not going to make it home.’

  Amid scenes of revolting cruelty inflicted by hunters clumsily killing (or trying to kill) the animals they have caught in their traps, the series insists that the men have no choice: otherwise these animals would stalk and gut them. Even wolverines, it says, ‘are capable of tearing human beings apart.’ When the biologist Adam Welz investigated this claim, he was unable to find a documented case of a wolverine attacking anyone, anywhere on earth.8 Had the series maintained that the town was being stalked by killer vending machines, the claim would have been no less plausible.

  Programs of this kind now throng the television schedules. Discovery has also broadcast a chilling documentary which claims that Carcharodon megalodon, a giant shark which has been extinct for over a million years, is still alive and roaming the oceans. In support of this thesis, it shows the horribly mutilated carcass of a whale, washed up on a beach.9 A contributor tells us “you can clearly see a bite radius in the whale. . . . The whale looks to be almost bit in half, it’s absolutely insane. Local marine biologists analysed the whale and determined—as crazy as it sounds—that the tail was bitten off in one bite.” That the picture looks like a clunky computer-generated image appears to be no deterrent to the thesis; or to the fabulous viewing figures.10

  The success of these shows reinforces the notion that we wish to believe we are surrounded by ancient terrors. Like the thousands of annual sightings of imaginary big cats, the ratings suggest we are missing something—something rich and grand and thrilling which resonates with our evolutionary history. Our imagination responds vividly to threats of the kind that we evolved to avoid. In the absence of sabretooths, lions and rampaging elephants, wolves will have to do.

  So when I see the myths propounded by Yukon Men or by the organizers of the Salmon Predator Derby, which encouraged people to travel to Salmon, Idaho, and compete for a prize of $1,000 for killing the largest wolf,11 I wonder whether some people hate wolves for the same reason that others love them. Because they have come to embody the fear and thrill that is often missing from our lives, people will fight to re-establish them as fiercely as others will fight to exterminate them.

  Nowhere are these conflicts played out with greater intensity than in North America. European lovers of nature gaze longingly at the Wilderness Act, that has so far protected 110 million acres of land from significant human impacts. They also recoil from the ways in which some people still engage with protected lands: at the recent case, for example, in which a hunter in the Lolo National Forest in Montana repeatedly shot someone’s pet malamute (and almost shot the owner) with a semiautomatic assault rifle.12 He was found to have broken no law, on the grounds that he believed the dog was a wolf, even though it was wearing an illuminated collar and its owner was screaming at him to stop.

  As ranchers and hunters lobby—with some success—to remove the wolf’s protections under the Endangered Species Act, other people are seeking to extend its range across the entire continent, by means of the world’s most ambitious rewilding program. The four mega-linkages proposed by Dave Foreman and the Rewilding Institute would connect conservation areas from Baja, California, to southern Alaska, from central America to the Yukon, from the Everglades to the Canadian Maritimes and from Alaska to Labrador.13 Their program seeks to reverse the fragmentation of habitats that has been driving local populations of many animals to extinction. It would create permeable landscapes, through which these animals could move once more. It hopes to restore the populations of large predators (such as wolves, bears, cougars, lynx, wolverines and jaguars) which would then begin to drive the dynamic ecological processes which permit so many other species to survive.

  The plan is wildly ambitious, but it might not be as implausible as some people assume. As Foreman points out, even in Florida, where the human population has been rising rapidly and the politics are often difficult, the government, working with private landowners, has spent billions of dollars and added millions of acres to its conservation network, to reconnect fragmented ecosystems.14 In the United States, perhaps more rapidly than anywhere else, farming is retreating from marginal and unproductive land; forests are returning and conservation easements and land trusts are proliferating.15 The impossible dream is beginning to look credible, and to embolden similar movements throughout the US and in other parts of the world. I hope that this book will inspire you to support them.

  Acknowledgements

  More than any other book I have written, Feral is a collaborative effort. While the words (except those quoted) are mine, and I have spent three years researching, writing and revising it, the ideas, structure and progress of this book have been developed with the help of many people, some of whom have given the project a great deal of their time and energy. I could not have written it without them.

  I am very grateful to Helen Conford, Ketty Hughes, Antony Harwood, James Macdonald Lockhart, Ritchie Tassell, Alan Watson Featherstone, Clive Hambler, Mark Fisher, Miles King, Dafydd Morris-Jones, Delyth Morris-Jones, Paul Kingsnorth, Tomaž Hartmann, Jernej Stritih, Jony Easterby, Nick Garrison, Simon Fairlie, Morgan Parry, P
eter Taylor, Bruce Heagerty, Jay Griffiths, Ralph Collard, Hannah Scrase, Michael Disney, Mick Green, Mark Lynas, Maria Padget, George Marshall, Annie Levy, Caitlin Shepherd, Estelle Bailey, Tammi Dallaston, Sharon Girardi, Mike Thrussell, Jean-Luc Solandt, Andy Warren, Jonathan Spencer, Jamie Lorimer, Adam Thorogood, David Hetherington, Paul Rose, Tobi Kellner, Steve Carver, Sophie Wynne-Jones, Ray Woods, Simon Drew, Miriam Quick, Leigh Caldwell, John Boardman, Meic Llewellyn, Guillaume Chapron, Staffan Widstrand, Kristjan Kaljund, Geoff Hill, Tom Edwards, Steve Forden, Paul Jepson, Joss Garman, Ann West, Clive Faulkner, Rod Aspinall, Liz Fleming-Williams, Grant Rowe, Ruth Davis, Elin Jones, Cath Midgley, Nick Fenwick, John Fish and Gary Momber.

  The mistakes this book doubtless contains are all my own work.

  I have changed the names of some of the places in mid-Wales in order to protect the wildlife I discuss from commercial exploitation. If you find yourself in the area and ask Welsh speakers how to find the places I have mentioned, you are likely to be met with some very odd looks.

  In the descriptive passages I have tended to use imperial measurements. When discussing scientific findings I have reverted to the metric system.

  Introduction

  It is an extraordinary thing for a foreigner to witness: one of the world’s most sophisticated and beautiful nations being ransacked by barbarians. It is more extraordinary still to consider that these barbarians are not members of a foreign army, but of that nation’s own elected government. The world has watched in astonishment as your liberal, cultured, decent country has been transformed into a thuggish petro-state. The oil curse which has blighted so many weaker nations has now struck in a place which seemed to epitomise solidity and sense.

  This is not to say that there were no warnings in Canada’s recent past. The nation has furnished the world with two of its most powerful environmental parables: one wholly bad, the other mostly good.

  The story of the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery reads like a biography of the two horsemen of ecological destruction: greed and denial. The basis on which the stocks were managed was the opposite of the Precautionary Principle: the Providential Principle. This means that if there’s even a one percent chance that our policy will not cause catastrophe, we’ll take it. Foreigners and seals were blamed for the depletion of the fish, while the obvious contribution of the Canadian fleet and the Canadian government was overlooked. The fisheries science was rigged and, when it still produced the wrong answers, disregarded or denounced.1 The government continued to sponsor bigger boats and new fish plants even as the stocks were crashing. A moratorium was imposed only after the fishery became commercially extinct: government and industry, after due consideration and debate, agreed that the non-existent fish should no longer be caught.