I recently finished George Monbiot’s book, Feral and was interested to hear peoples’ reactions here, if anybody else had read it or GM’s other writing on the topic.
Overall I really enjoyed reading the book. There’s lots of useful info about the state of the ecology in the British Isles before the industrial revolution and other depredations of the civilised culture. I especially appreciated the focus on sea and river life, which hasn’t really figured in my own foraging adventures thus far because I’m miles away from the sea and, well, I wouldn’t be comfortable eating anything from our inland waterways without first doing major research into the local toxicity issues. Amazing to consider that the North Sea would have been a different colour before the first trawlers killed off the massive populations of oysters and other filter feeders on the seabed. Also the rivers only being brown because of soil erosion due to agriculture and livestock farming…
The stuff on sheep and the uplands really struck a chord with me too. They do quite clearly act as a boot on the neck of the non-human (non-domesticated) world by favouring the growth of grass, which gets nibbled to the ground leaving a habitat of minimal worth. However he provides a long discussion with an educated Welsh sheep farmer which gets into the perennial problem of nature conservation - hands-off observation only, or human engagement via direct subsistence. I actually sympathised more with the farmer, because it seems more important to have that direct connection to the land (even if in an exploitative capacity?) than to only benefit from it indirectly through eco-tourism or other alienated relationships, which seems to be as far as Monbiot’s imagination stretches (he talks about wolves and beavers in Yellowstone Park and their various beneficial effects through trophic cascades, but he never mentions the indigenous people of that region - what effects they had, and should we consider reintroducing wild humans too??)
For me the main drawbacks were his refusal to take seriously the anarcho-primitivist view of rewilding, on the grounds that Mesolithic Britain only played host to a few thousand h/gers and the old trope that a return to that kind of lifestyle would hence require a genocide of most of the current population, and his uncritical acceptance of the overkill theory, based on recent research which seems very far from conclusive. His depiction of Pleistocene h/gers at times made me laugh out loud:
Had the Mesolithic people of the Americas eaten everything they killed , they would scarcely have trimmed the herds of game, so small were their numbers. One ground sloth could have fed a clan of hunters for months. The speed with which the megafauna of the Americas collapsed might suggest that they slaughtered everything they encountered. Among those who broke into the New World, anyone could be a Theseus or a Hercules: slaying improbable monsters, laying up a stock of epic tales to pass to their descendants. [...] Perhaps the care with which some indigenous people of the Americas engage with the natural world came later. (p.138)
The last sentence to me indicates that he knows he’s on dangerous ground. There’s no footnote, and he doesn’t discuss modern h/gers or anthropological studies anywhere in the book, or in any of his other work that I’ve seen, for that matter. He speaks generously and evocatively about Mesolithic beachcombers and talks about time spent with Masai herders, but as soon as he gets back to the Pleistocene the depiction of Homo Sapiens is of an ecocidal maniac every bit as callous and mindless as modern poachers and the capitalists that support them. I find this view troubling and implicitly racist, as I attempted to explore in this blogpost reacting to an especially terrible article of his on the megafauna issue.
Also lacking is an in-depth understanding of civilisation and the agriculture that underpins it, as made clear by this quote:
While some primitivists see a conflict between the civilised and the wild, the rewilding I envisage has nothing to do with shedding civilisation. We can, I believe, enjoy the benefits of advanced technology while also enjoying, if we choose, a life richer in adventure and surprise. Rewilding is not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it. It is to 'love not man the less, but Nature more'. (p.10)
He doesn’t seem to view human rewilding as a serious attempt to reorganise the human methods of subsistence, but more as a kind of weekend activity to relieve city-workers of their ‘ecological boredom’. As such, while the rewilding he advocates may bring many benefits to nonhuman life, the core problem remains unsolved and the day job (facilitating the destruction of nonhuman and human communities in other parts of the world) will always take precedence.
Anyway… I’d be interested to hear your thoughts! What about this herbivore-led rewilding that’s gained ground thanks to Franz Vera and the Rewilding Europe crowd? Some potential or another dead end? (Related reading: http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk/articles/what_rewilding.htm )
Good to see the forums back in action!
cheers,
Ian
