George Monbiot - Feral : rewilding the land, the sea, and human life

Praise for Feral

Drawing on a life of rich observation and experience, George Monbiot regales us with stories of lifes astonishing capacity for renewal and offers an uplifting and inspiring goal beyond the cessation of our destructive rampagethe 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 somethingwhich puts him, these days, well ahead of most of our tribe. Plus, this peculiar and involving bookthree-quarters exhilarating environmental manifesto, one quarter midlife crisishas an enormous amount to recommend it.... Extraordinarily good and crunchy material.... Theres a lot here to digest and think about, much to be excited by.

The Spectator

A highly analytical and richly researched book.

Macleans

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

Monbiots 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 polemicists 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 Monbiots argument has the hypnotic effect of a stoat beguiling a hapless rabbit. Soon you find yourself dazedly agreeing that its 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

Monbiots latest book stands in a long tradition of back-to-nature narratives, the most famous of which is Thoreaus 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

Theres nothing ignoble about Monbiots vision of reinstating ecosystems in which mans 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 dont change our ways in the hell of a hurry, well 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 originalboth 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

GEORGE MONBIOT

Feral

Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO

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 Mans 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

639.97'9dc23

2014013971

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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

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.