Feral, by Geoge Monbiot – review

One of the greatest difficulties environmental activists have always had in the war for hearts ’n’ minds is that they so often seem priggish and negative. Everyone knows what they are against (central heating, fun, cod and chips, James Delingpole etc). Fewer people know what they are for. Here, therefore, is George Monbiot’s attempt — shot through — no, positively ravished — with personal feeling — to tell us. He offers, he says, a set of ideas ‘not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it […] to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.’

‘Rewilding’, in his definition, means something different from ‘stewarding the environment’ or ‘conservation’: the idea is not to control or protect ecosystems so much as to give nature a chance to get on with it, and to enjoy the results. We live, as Monbiot laments, in a world where many of us encounter nature no more closely than when feeding the ducks, and ‘the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts’. Like the philosopher John Gray, to whose recent The Silence of Animals this would be an amiable companion, Monbiot believes that an encounter with the wild serves a spiritual need. In rewilding our surroundings we also rewild ourselves.

He dreams of letting forest re-establish itself where dismal ‘conservationists’ insist on maintaining the desert of heather-and-scrub that centuries of overgrazing have left us. He wants to see beavers plashing in our rivers, ospreys, wolves and (ideally) elephant wandering the Welsh hills and the Scottish highlands, if not the South Downs. He offers well-explained and meticulously evidenced reasons why rewilding large parts of the country could be both economically and ecologically advantageous. But he makes no bones about the deep reason he’s in favour: which is that it would be amazingly cool.