Feral (2013)

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 21^st 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	1621 AD	7	None.  Risks to people and livestock.
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.