As soon as I heard about rewilding as a concept, I was hooked. I seem to recall first hearing the word at the same time as finding out about the campaign to reintroduce the lynx to Britain, and while I'd heard for years about long-shot campaigns to bring back wolves, my affinity for felines meant my enthusiasm was easily sparked on this occasion and I started diving into it, looking for more examples.
I was surprised to find I already knew about perhaps the most stunning and well-known examples. When I was a kid, my family and I visited Yellowstone shortly after they reintroduced the wolf populations there and I remember feeling so excited to think that I might see one. Of course I didn't, but I think in my heart I always loved the idea of wild places even if I only ever got to see their margins. To me, just being in their habitat was exciting - quite the opposite of a zoo, where animals are in pens so small you can't miss them while you roam free. Instead, we stuck close to our cars and the well marked trails, and may not see anything more exotic than a grey squirrel, but it was more exciting knowing that the animals that were out there somewhere were living their lives the way they always had - the way they are supposed to. There was something right about wolves in the American west, just as there is something right about lynxes in Scotland. Giving predators the space to hunt means protecting huge swathes of land that can't help but become wild. Decades on, wolves have changed Yellowstone for the better, and in so many surprising ways. I can't help feel excited about what might happen to the landscapes of Britain if we let our native predators return and give them the space they need to thrive.
So, when I found Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot, a book about rewilding from a British perspective, I was very excited to give it a read.
It began a bit slowly for me. I found myself skimming over the personal anecdotes, but several did pull me in, and Monbiot is an undeniably talented nature writer. Instead, I chiefly hunted for the broader discussion of case studies, issues and theories around rewilding. I was not disappointed - the book was full of dispatches from the front lines of reforesting projects, species reintroductions and regulatory changes all in the interest of supporting biodiversity in the UK. Each of these examples impressed upon me how little is needed to turn the tide - one species, or two decades, or a few hundred acres can see the return of ecosystems that human activity had previously destroyed.
Just as ranchers near Yellowstone protested the reintroduction of wolves, however, rewilding in the UK is contentious for a variety of reasons. While I'm sympathetic to the fears and anger associated with governments telling working people what to do, taking their land for their own purposes, I believe that there is a compromise - an approach that works for both humans and non-human life. Halting environmental destruction is as beneficial to farmers as to politicians, and to present generations as to future ones.
I did take issue with two chapters that diverted into a somewhat different thesis, that humans long to be wild and thus create legends and folk heroes that represent "wildness" to our psyches. As an example of this longing he presented two figures: the fictional character of Johnny Byron from the play Jerusalem, who Monbiot reports is a drug dealer, a drunk, a fighter and a womaniser; and Raoul Moat, a very real person who murdered his ex-partner and her boyfriend and then evaded the police for almost a week before killing himself in a standoff. I find the casting of these two arguably misogynist figures as epitomes of a suppressed desire for wildness odd to say the least. While they represent a kind of unlawful wildness, I think that is a far cry from what rewilding represents. Wilderness and wildness are two very different things - a lynx kills to feed itself or its young, while Moat killed out of revenge, pride, or some other combination of urges. Nature obeys rules that keep a balance, quite different from drinking and copulating to excess. And to cast wilderness as exclusively - and even violently - male and masculine perpetuates the idea that the outdoors are no place for women and marginalised people. The idea of doing what one wants regardless of consequences is definitively unsustainable. Rewilding is not about roguish rule-breaking but about planting a metaphorical (or literal) seed and stepping back to watch what grows.
That diversion aside, I found this book an excellent and well-written introduction to the issues of rewilding in the context of the UK. Monbiot was very much preaching to the converted in my case, but I was glad to have more recent and geographically relevant examples than my childhood experience in Yellowstone. I find myself fascinated and excited by the concept of rewilding, and how it represents a radical shift from our present relationship to land use. That there is value in wilderness existing - not for humans to conquer, tame or extract from, but for its own sake - is a radical shift and one that is long overdue.
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