When one of The Guardian’s chief environmental writers
publishes a book called Feral you
have to get a few chapters in before you can relax that the book isn’t going to
descend into anti-capitalist anarchy.
Fortunately, George Monbiot has written an impassioned account of the arguable
need to return to a more wild way of caring for the ecosystems of the
world. Unfortunately, it does suffer
from a wanton disregard for the people who currently make their living farming
the land (and hence descends dangerously close to anti-capitalist anarchy). But, perhaps that is precisely his point.
Just as Feral is a
book about competing interests (those who seek to manage the natural world versus those who seek a more
laissez-faire approach), Feral is
also a book with competing halves (how we have come to live in a world less
wild versus how we can live in a
world more wild in the future).
Monbiot’s founding principle is that humans have always caused the
degradation of the natural world and the collapse of nonhuman populations.
Even a cursory study of human history proves this to be true.
Whenever people broke into new lands,
however rudimentary their technology and small their numbers, they soon
destroyed much of the wildlife – especially the numbers of larger animals –
that lived there. There has never been a
state of grace or a golden age in which people lived in harmony with nature. The spur to action is that the 21st
century has seen a significant acceleration in both trends. This is so much so that now not even the
planet’s oceans are safe from human impact.
In fact, the world’s continental shelves are being trawled at 150 times
the rate at which forests on land are cleared.
It is clear that wherever human populations have exploded,
nonhuman populations and ecosystems have conversely crashed.
Rewilding
Monbiot’s panacea to this timeless but also most modern of
problems is that of “rewilding”.
As Monbiot puts it, “Rewilding
is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own
way. It involves reintroducing absent
plants and animals (and in a few cases culling exotic species which cannot be
contained by native wildlife), pulling down the fences, blocking the drainage
ditches but otherwise stepping back. At
sea it means excluding commercial fishing and other forms of exploitation. The ecosystems that result are best described
not as wilderness, but as self-willed: governed not by human processes but by
their own processes. Rewilding has no
end point, no view about what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of
species looks like. It does no strive to
produce a heath, a meadow, a kelp garden or a coral reef. It lets nature decide.”
Well, doesn’t that sound grand? But even the most ardent of
environmentalists would have a hard time with the notion that we should just
let the grass grow and live in a state of complete naturalness. The roads, shopping malls, housing estates
and skyscrapers have been built and, for better or worse, our modern lives are
in turn built around them. At first
glance, Monbiot’s idea seems to fly in the face of the inexorable march of
progress, to hark for a simpler time, and I was left questioning: can you put
the genie back in the bottle?
However, throughout Feral,
two rationales are presented to argue that the rewilding of natural ecosystems
is not an attempt to restore them to any prior state or to prevent the
functioning of modern society, but instead just to permit ecological processes
to resume to enable modern life to co-exist harmoniously with natural life. Instead, rewilding is about improving what
wild areas we do have.
Rationale for
Rewilding – Number 1
The first idea underpinning rewilding efforts is that of “Shifting
Baseline Syndrome”.
Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a dressed up way of saying
that the people of every generation perceive the state of the ecosystem they
encountered as a child to be the norm.
When fish or animals are depleted, campaigners or scientists usually
call for them to be restored to the levels that existed in their youth: their
own ecological baseline.
The silent but dangerous by-product of such a short
historical perspective is that the bounty of nature is slipping away in front
of our eyes without anybody able to notice.
Consequently, we are all unaware that what was considered normal when we
were children was in fact a state extreme depletion. Over generations, this has caused a huge but
largely imperceptible decrease in the number of fauna and flora that grace
almost all the planet’s ecosystems.
Monbiot presents compelling data to evidence that, until
relatively recently, large animals lived almost everywhere on the planet and
often in great numbers. Additionally, large
species have been excluded from temperate regions not by any natural,
ecological or physiological constraints, but by humans.
Shifting Baseline Syndrome prevents us all from appreciating
such a seismic shift and is leading us dangerously close to a relatively sparse
natural world.
Rationale for
Rewilding – Number 2
But why is an imperceptible decrease in large species
important? The answer, according to Monbiot,
lies in the unappreciated significance of trophic diversity.
Trophic means relating to food and feeding. Restoring trophic diversity means increasing
the number of opportunities for animals, plants and other species to feed on
each other. It means increasing the
number of trophic levels (top predators, middle predators, plant eaters,
plants, carrion and detritus feeders) and creating opportunities for the number
and complexity of relationships at every level to rise.
When large species at the top of a foodchain are hunted or
their habitats are destroyed with the result that their numbers decrease
significantly, a trophic cascade is likely to occur where the population of
each species beneath it in the foodchain also decreases.
At first I found the idea of a trophic cascade to be
counterintuitive. Surely when your chief
predator dies off, those animals that were formally prey should be able to
thrive. However, Monbiot’s presentation
of a new school of ecological thinking is hard to argue with.
The old belief among ecologists was that natural systems
were controlled only from the bottom up: that the abundance of plants controls
the abundance of plant eaters, which controls the abundance of meat eaters. The new understanding is that top predators,
large herbivores and keystone species (ones that have a larger impact on its
environment than its numbers alone would suggest) unwittingly re-engineer the
environments in which they live. In some
cases they change not only the ecosystem but also the nature of the soil, the
behaviour of the rivers, the chemistry of the oceans and even the composition
of the atmosphere.
The beaver is one of several missing animals in the UK that
has been described as a keystone species.
A beaver is a keystone species because its activities radically change
the behaviour of a river. They slow it
down. They reduce scouring and erosion. They trap much of the load it carries, ensuring
that water runs more clearly. They
create small wetlands and boggy areas.
They make it more structurally diverse, providing homes for many other
species. Far from spreading disease,
their dams filter out the sediments containing faecal bacteria. Consequently, the beaver creates many of the
conditions that allow other species to live.
So conversely, when beaver numbers are drastically reduced, so are many
of the species that live in the river or on the river bank.
Similar stories can be seen at sea as well as on land. Perhaps the most famous trophic cascade in
the seas took place along the eastern rim of the Pacific, where sea otters,
once widespread and abundant, were almost wiped out by both native people and
fur traders. The result was the
near-disappearance of the coastal ecosystem.
Sea otters prey on urchins, among other species. Sea urchins graze on kelp, the long and
leathery seaweed that, in the right conditions, produces tall, dense
undergrowths reminiscent of terrestrial forests. These harbour a wonderful variety of fish and
other creatures. Consequently, when the
sea otters were nearly wiped out, so was much of the fish life that lived in
the same ecosystem.
Likewise, as whale numbers have declined, so have those of
krill: to just one-tenth of their volume before the 1980s. Their collapse, until recently, mystified
observers. It now seems that the whales,
by diving down through the water column, perform an essential role in circulating
nutrients up to the surface waters and thereby feeding the krill. If undisturbed by whales, the plant plankton that
the krill feed on would sink out of sight, beyond the photic zone (the waters
in which the light is strong enough to permit plants to grow). Furthermore, the nutrients contained within
the plankton sink, becoming unavailable to most other lifeforms. Consequently, as whale numbers are reduced, the
surface waters rapidly become depleted of essential minerals, especially iron,
whose scarcity limits growth more generally.
The natural conclusion is that an ecosystem lacking in
trophic diversity (and particularly top predators, large herbivores or keystone
species) is one that lacks the interconnection between species that creates abundance
and robustness. Reintroducing these
species can therefore create the right conditions in which nature’s bounty may
be (somewhat) restored.
A Plan to Reintroduce
Animals in the UK
With that rationale in mind, Monbiot presents a fascinating
review of the species that we may wish to reintroduce in order to restore the
health and wealth of the wild areas of the UK.
I have reproduced a copy of the review’s most interesting entries in a
table below, all of which at some point in history roamed the wilds of the UK
(I was shocked to learn that the elephant bones were excavated from under
Piccadilly Circus).
Now however, according to the Cairngorns Wildcat Project,
the UK is the largest country in Europe, and almost the whole world, which no
longer possesses any of its big carnivores.
The reintroduction of just a few of the species suggested below may go a
long way to making the UK a more bountiful environment.
Name of species
|
Approximate date of extinction
in Britain
|
Suitability for reintroduction
(out of 10)
|
Reintroduction efforts so far
|
Beaver
|
Mid 18th century
|
10
|
Officially released in the Knapdale Forest, Argyll.
|
Wolves |
|
|
|
Wild boar
|
Mid 13th century
|
10
|
Four small populations in southern England.
|
Elk or Moose
|
1900 BC
|
10
|
Released in 200 into a rewilding project in Sutherland
|
Lynx
|
600 BC
|
9
|
None. Will kill the occasional
sheep.
|
Lion
|
8,700 BC (in Netherlands)
|
1
|
None.
|
Elephant
|
115,000 years ago. Hunted to
extinction in Europe 40,000 years ago.
|
2
|
None.
|
Hippopotamus
|
100,000 years ago
|
1
|
None. Suitable habitat in
short supply. Can be extremely
dangerous.
|
Grey whale
|
Remains found off the coast of Devon dating around 1600 AD
|
7
|
University of Central Lancashire has a plan to relocate fifty grey
whales from the Pacific to the Irish Sea.
|
The aim of such review is not to advocate for all of their
reintroduction into the British wilderness (see the suitability score for
each), but instead to expand the range of what people think is possible, to
open up the ecological imagination.
Each species would present its own unique challenges and
would require a careful PR campaign with the British public in order to explain
their benefit to trophic diversity and the overall health of the
environment. However, I am immediately
attracted to the reintroduction of the beaver, the elk and the boar. I believe they would be relatively safe
starting points for the UK consciousness regarding excitement about rewilding
efforts.
Whilst Monbiot advocates reintroducing wolves into the UK
because they kill foxes, reduce disease and assist the owners of grouse moors
and deer estates, I am not convinced that the UK public is yet willing to
accept an animal known to be so dangerous even if the return of the wolf also
makes the introduction of other missing species – such as boar and moose – more
viable, as their populations will be checked without the need for human
intervention.
Opposition to Rewilding
The public’s reticence to reintroducing potentially
dangerous animals into the wild is just one of a few problems I can see with
rewilding efforts.
I would argue that the most pressing problem with rewilding
is that it is somewhat at odds with the planet’s need to produce more food (see
my previous review of The End of Plenty :
The Race to Feed a Crowded World for more information about that issue). Reason being that central to Monbiot’s
argument that the habitats for top predators, large herbivores and keystone
species are being privately seized is the reason that, particularly in the UK,
the farming of livestock takes up that land.
Specifically, Monbiot takes against Welsh sheep farmers
quite aggressively, “Sheep farming in
this country is a slow-burning ecological disaster, which has done more damage
to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial
pollution. Yet scarcely anyone seems to
have noticed...Since the Second World War, sheep have reduced what remained of
the upland flora to stubble. In 6,000
years, domestic animals (alongside burning and clearing for crops and the
cutting of trees for wood) transformed almost all the upland ecosystems of
Britain from closed canopy forest to open forest, from open forest to scrub and
from scrub to heath and long sward. In
just sixty years, the greatly increased flocks in most of the upland areas of
Britain completed the transformation: turning heath and prairie into something
resembling a bowling green with contours.”
Whilst I have sympathy with Monbiot’s position that farming
has consistently divided up the land, stripped the soil of its fertility and
pushed out other forms of flora and fauna to maximise production of a
monoculture, it cannot be said that we produce too much meat or too many crops
in this country (or indeed in the world).
Yes, it is true that Wales now
possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of other European
countries and, between 1950 and 1999, the number of sheep in Wales rose from
3.8 to 11.6 million, but the recent
statistics also indicate that 25 per cent of low income families in the UK
struggle to eat regularly.
If the cost of reintroducing the elk to the UK wilderness is
a decrease in farmland, resulting in less food supply, higher prices and rising
rates of malnutrition or starvation of humans then I am not in favour. A long term view may suggest that by increasing
trophic diversity the foodchain becomes more robust for all species (including
humans), the short term reality for starving families would dictate that reintroduction
at the expense of farmland can only be an option when we have a food
surplus. For now, any attempts to
improve trophic diversity should be done without reference to annexation of
farmland.
The second argument against rewilding is one of psychology. Could
it be said that rewilding is actually about alleviating human guilt? Are we simply reintroducing old species to
cover up the sins of our ancestors? And
if rewilding is all about letting nature take its own course, then why do we
believe further meddling will undo our previous meddling?
There are many ways in which Monbiot tries to unearth the
psychological urge for a wilder, more feral life that do not rely on the
exorcism of human guilt regarding the environment: the urge to shop as a
foraging instinct, football as a sublimated hunt, violent films as a remedy for
unexorcised conflict, the pursuit of ever more extreme sports as a response to
the absence of dangerous wild animals, the cult of celebrity chef as an attempt
once more to engage with the fruits of the land and sea. I don’t find any of these to be particularly
persuasive. However, I also don’t care
if we are motivated by guilt because I believe the preservation or restoration
of nature to be a worthy end in and of itself.
The third argument against rewilding is that puts the cart
before the horse. That is to say, if the
object is to protect the wilderness, the first challenge is to curtail
commercial deforestation efforts.
Without such curtailment, there will be very few jungles, forests,
woods, swamps, mangroves, prairies or reefs in which to reintroduce lost
species.
Motivations for Rewilding
Whilst I am clearly not sold on a full-blooded approach to
rewilding, I am sold that the drive towards monoculture causes a dewilding of
both places and people. It strips the
Earth of the diversity of life and natural structure to which human beings are
drawn. It creates a dull world, a world
lacking in colour and variety, which enhances ecological boredom, narrows the
scope of our lives and limits the range of our engagement with nature.
Rewilding would also create a great boon for the green
economy. In the early years, rewilding
would require lots of labour: planting trees, reintroducing lost plants and
animals, removing fences and controlling exotic invasive species. As the ecosystem recovered, the rewilding
workforce would decline, but the potential for generating money from tourism
would rise. It is possible to envisage a
thriving community of wardens and guides, providing bed and breakfasts, farm
shops, clay-pigeon shooting, bicycle hire, horse riding, fishing lakes,
falconry, archery and all the other services that now help rural communities to
prosper.
Conclusion
The environmental movement up till now has been necessarily
reactive. We have been clear about what
we don’t like. But we also need to say what
we would like. We need to show where hope lies and ecological restoration could
be a work of hope that is mutually beneficial to humans and the environment.
Most human endeavours, unless checked by public dissent,
evolve into monocultures. Money seeks
out a region’s comparative advantage – the field in which it competes most
successful – and promotes it to the exclusion of all else. Following this logic, every landscape or
seascape performs just one function. However, the more we understand about how
ecosystems work, the less appropriate certain conservation strategies appear to
be. Most conservation strategies focus
only on the physical infrastructure – the trees, shrubs and deadwood which
provide habitats for many species – and not the connections between species
that build an ecosystem. Consequently, I
applaud Monbiot for his efforts in promoting the cause of rewilding in the
public discourse and I support the reintroduction of the beaver, the elk and
the wild boar back into the UK (and other appropriate species in other
ecosystems across the world). Prior to
reading this book, I had very little knowledge of the importance of many
species and the on-going efforts to reintroduce them.
Unfortunately, most of the rewilding that has happened on
earth so far has taken place as a result of humanitarian disasters. Therefore, it is time that we support a much
more proactive vision of ecosystems that we wish to live in and rely upon.