The Return of the Forests
Thoughts on the book ‘Feral’, By George Monbiot
I have been sad about The Environment since I became aware of the concept of The Environment. As a child I worried about the whales, the elephants, the tigers, the polar bears. The poor, beleaguered rhino. Later I worried about red squirrels and corncrakes and the slow, steady reduction of big trees. None of these worries were scientific, knowledgable, whole. Just a young awareness of the bleak, dark glacier of degradation. An awareness that it only went one way. That if you could just hang onto this forest for another fifty years it would be a great achievement, but it would always be a hanging on. Clenched fingers, gritted teeth. Nature would be sectioned and preserved, but would certainly never be added to again. I often wonder about the impact of negative feelings about ecology and environment on me. I wonder how it has shaped my feelings about the world, people, society, the future. Helene has been writing lessons about the environment for children and it reminds me clearly of my own sad lessons at that age. A millstone we hang on our children in the hopes that they do something about it by the time they are allowed agency, in the hope that they do not not shrug it off or simply get used the endless, depressing weight of it.
‘Feral’ is the first ecologically positive book I’ve read in my entire life. At times it almost made me cry. I tried to rein it in, to keep a cap on my feelings. I tried to remain critical. It was difficult.
I will try to summarise: George Monbiot is in favour of rewilding large tracts of land and sea in the United Kingdom. Rewilding in the UK ultimately means, in almost all places, reforestation with indigenous species. He argues that many of the environments in these islands that we think of as naturally rugged, sparse wildernesses are manmade, but were manmade before recorded history. From the Cambrian Mountains to the Scottish Highlands, much of heather scrub we call wild is an artificial environment of razed forest maintained by the grazing patterns of sheep (not native to our ecosystem) and deer populations unmanaged by ousted natural predators such as wolves and lynx. Sheep farming in such areas is heavily subsidised by the state, and he proposes that there would be little economic cost to allowing subsidies to also cover rewilding of uplands. He argues (with numbers) that the tourist and ecological benefits could far outweigh the small national income from sheep farming. He does not want to kill farming and remove farmers, but rather to change the concept of what farming these rough terrains means. He argues also for the reintroduction of extinct species such a wild boar, which have a profoundly different grazing pattern that supports forest regrowth and biodiversity. He uses examples of rewilding that is happening, managed and unmanaged, in other European countries to support the science of reforestation. Ultimately he supports the reintroduction of wolves and other helpful species, particularly in Scotland, but he acknowledges that this could be a long process.
The key difference this argument has made to my perception of ecology around me is Monbiot’s timeframe. Once you begin to think about what ecology means, on a truly ecological timeframe, many of our attitudes towards our current species and landscapes begin to look ridiculous. Birch trees attempting to recolonise scrub desert “wildernesses” are actively resisted. Boars are listed as invasive species when, ecologically speaking, they are a native species hunted to extinction by humans less than a thousand years ago. The attitude is to preserve this moment in time, this precise arrangement which has already been so fundamentally altered by human intervention. We clear dead wood and graze sheep in our remaining forests to keep the forest floor clean, killing the future trees and the habitats for insect species. It is an unsustainable model that attempts to quash the natural chaotic churning of an untrammelled ecosystem.
Ireland, for all its beauty, for all the beautiful places I have shown you, is a managed place. Its greenness is the greenness of fields, not of forests. Monbiot focuses on the UK (including Northern Ireland), and Ireland has a unique ecology, but his book is altering the way I perceive many of the remaining “wild” landscapes of Ireland. It has been a painful fortnight, in many ways. The rugged mountains of Wicklow and Kerry are grazed in just the way Monbiot describes. The underwood carpets of bluebells that have always delighted me are the result of a denuded ecosystem, where the lack of agitating undergrowth foragers has allowed one species to crowd out the rest. Even the bogs we fight to preserve are a result of prehistoric logging and burning on a massive scale. What do we seek to maintain, and why?
It is at times an overwhelmingly optimistic book. Attitudes are changing, he believes. People want this. Monbiot is a romantic. He acknowledges it. The first few chapters contain somewhat self-aggrandising accounts of his adventures in nature. Often, after making a decent fist of a scientific argument to support his thesis, he clarifies at the chapter’s end that he is simply making this case because of his gut. His gut tells him that he wants wildness, wolves, untamed forest. His arguments all spring from this feeling. We have similar guts.
