Feral

This book, an extended study on rewilding by veteran environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot, was, even moreso than are most of his books, eye-opening and incredible. I was lucky enough to pick up a pre-release signed copy at a SPERI lecture he gave at my uni last year, browsed through a couple of chapters over summer, and have finished it in a spurt of ecological interest over the last few days.

   It's about our misjudged place in nature: how this has been lost over the past few millennia of human civilisation gradually conquering and flattening the ecosystems it moves into; how this has been forgotten over the enforced retention* of systems that prevent those ecosystems from properly recovering; how this has been distorted by vast industrial processes reaping finite natural stocks and processes as though they were limitless income. Running common to these scenes of destruction and degradation are veins of hope and potential - rewilding, the main topic of the book. Rewilding is basically handing over control of ecosystems to nature; reintroducing missing species that play key ecological roles of predation, habitat manipulation, resource creation and such, helps revitalise the balanced diversity of flora and fauna in those systems.**

   The text resembles a sort of ecosystem of prose in itself: a jumbledly overlapping yet coherent and cogent mix of writing. There are impeccably-researched-and-referenced scrutinies of ecosystem development policy successes and failures, insightful discourses on biological and philosophical perspectives of man's place and part in nature, and enthralling anecdotes of George's personal experiences with people, plants, animals, landscapes that have helped inform and shape his perspectives. You will be bowled over by gorgeous descriptions of sublime natural explorations and encounters, wholeheartedly inspired by introductions to selfless hippy-type individuals involved in rewilding projects, shunted into enlightenment by a chunk of analysis and into astonished outrage or delight by a series of statistics or facts, often all within a page or two of each other. It really is a bizarrely multitudinous reading experience, and make so much the better for it. It strikes the head, the heart and the gut with equal measure, never supplanting reason for emotion but finding the root human passions that lie at the base of all his arguments and laying them together perfectly.

   It's a book that makes one want to re-engage with nature, to do all within one's power to remove human corruption from the ecosystems it has enslaved and despoilt, to hand control back to Mother Gaia. Anyone interested in ecology should read it for enjoyment, anyone interested in social and natural justice should read it to inform their opinions, most people should probably read it to broaden their anthropocentric worldviews and bring about pressure for change. Quality, timely, and deeply important.

* This book might make you rightly despise grouse hunters, fishing trawlers, and especially sheep.

** This book might make you rightly adore beavers, oysters, wolves and dead trees.