Source: CBC Radio One: The Sunday Edition
URL: http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/ID/2399236755/
Date: 04/08/2013
Event: George Monbiot on "rewilding" and "a mass restoration of the natural world"
Credit: CBC Radio One
People:
Laura Lynch: Some people long for nature as it once existed, before the footprint of human progress and civilisation exacted a toll on the Earth and its ecosystems. They mourn the loss of species of animals, birds and fish, and the vanishing of wild places, and so desire to return the natural world to its once pristine state. But George Monbiot argues that aside from being resilient and resourceful, nature is not as sentimental nor nostalgic for its own past. Monbiot's column in the Guardian newspaper is one of the most widely read and influential in Britain, and he's one of Britain's most provocative environmentalists. He's the author of several books, and his latest is called Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life. In Feral, he argues that if we just stop messing with nature, we'd find it would lick its wounds and get back to business, although not necessarily in a form we'd recognise or even approve of. And in letting nature call the shots, we might recapture an essential wildness within ourselves. George Monbiot joins me now from a studio in Oxford, England. Hello.
George Monbiot: Hello, Laura.
Laura Lynch: In the introduction to Feral, in the Canadian edition of the book, there seems to be something like an open letter to Canada. And you write in it that there are, in fact, two Canadas. One you call insatiable, blindly destructive, unmoved by beauty, the other brave, unselfish and farsighted. There's no doubt which of the two is now dominant, you write. So what do you see happening in Canada?
George Monbiot: Well, at the moment, this highly cultured, sophisticated, wonderful nation seems to be descending into a thuggish petro-state, which appears to be governed by the tar patch. And its politics seem to suffer from the oil curse, as so many countries suffer from, when they have found big reserves of fossil fuels. And wildlife is suffering greatly, as a result. Natural resources of all kinds are suffering greatly, and so, of course, are those who love nature.
Laura Lynch: You draw a link between the collapse of the cod fishery in the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland and the oil sands. What do you see as the connection?
George Monbiot: Mm. Well, the collapse of the cod fishery is almost a perfect environmental parable of politicians being in denial, of industry believing its own hype, of people turning a blind eye to the extremely obvious facts that were taking place. And exactly the same thing is now happening in the oil patch, where all sorts of nonsense is put out by the industry and is accepted and repeated by politicians, and the nation is effectively being reshaped around its demands. And so, instead of Canadian politics shaping its response to the exploitation of tar sands, the tar sands have, instead, shaped Canadian politics. And I think that's lethal, not just for the natural world but it's also very dangerous for democracy.
Laura Lynch: I'm sure that a lot of Canadians are not going to like the words that you're using, when you're calling Canada a "thuggish petro-state", and you also use rhetoric like this passage from the book: "One of the world's most sophisticated, beautiful nations has been ransacked by barbarians". Are you at all concerned about turning people off and ensuring that they won't even listen to you?
George Monbiot: Well, some people might not, and some people might listen more. Um, but I do think that Canada is being ransacked by barbarians, and if I think that, I feel I ought to state it. I think it's shocking, disgraceful, extraordinary, what is happening in that country. And it's a wonderful country, and when I've visited Canada, I've just loved it. And it breaks my heart to see what is happening there.
Laura Lynch: Well, what do you see as being the change that needs to happen, then?
George Monbiot: Well, it's a change that needs to happen worldwide, and it's not confined to Canada. We just need a great deal more love and respect and wonder for the natural world, and recognition that we can maintain a very fine quality of life without having to ransack it. And there are so many wonders in Canada, there are so many other things on which you could trade. I mean, it's revered worldwide for having these magnificent wilderness areas, fantastic large animals which people will travel from all over the world to see. But, even then, those two are being destroyed in many cases, be it for trophy hunting or the woodland caribou being driven out by the development of oil and tar sands. It's almost as if Canada is ripping up its most precious natural assets, in exchange for assets which won't last long and which can only cause harm. And that, to me, seems to be completely perverse.
Laura Lynch: Let's turn to the main contents of the book itself, which in fact takes place largely in Britain. The book, as I said, is about "rewilding", so let's talk about that term. What is rewilding?
George Monbiot: Well, it's a young word, which has already accumulated many definitions, but there are two, in particular, that appeal to me. And one is a mass restoration of the natural world. And it's really not a complicated business. Where land becomes available - and, interestingly, in many parts of the world, in infertile places, farmers are now vacating the land, because globalisation makes the least fertile places uncompetitive - there it really is a matter of taking down the fences, blocking up the drainage ditches, reintroducing some of the missing species which have been driven out of those places, and standing back. And one of our tendencies - it's a very common human tendency - is to try to manage and control, and to see ourselves as the stewards of the land, to take really an Old Testament view of dominion, that we're responsible for looking after all the animals and plants. Well, nature did pretty well for the three billion years before we turned up. And it could do pretty well again, if we learned to interfere less.
Laura Lynch: Are you talking about letting nature take its course, all over? Or are there limits around it? I know you're saying "take the fences down", but would there be border areas, are you talking about letting the whole place just become rewilded?
George Monbiot: Well no, I mean, obviously this is places which aren't of high agricultural value, because we're going to have to feed people - we can't take good agricultural land out of production, that's my feeling. It would be confined to certain areas, but I'd like those areas to be large. And in Canada, some of it is just a bit of tweaking, really, because you've still got almost intact large areas where just a little bit of extra protection, a little bit of withdrawing of certain destructive industries - and perhaps their replacement with equally lucrative but non-destructive ones, such as eco-tourism - would have fantastic effects, and allow particularly the larger wildlife to thrive again. In Britain, we have to go an awful lot further, because - I mean, Canadians are amazed when they come here and see that our national parks are no more than sheep ranches.
Laura Lynch: Now, you raised the sheep, and you seem to bear a particular distaste for the sheep, and what they have brought to Britain. Can you talk to me about that? You call sheep farming a slow burning ecological disaster.
George Monbiot: Well, I mean, in this country it's done more extensive ecological damage than all the building that's ever taken place here. And it's the same in many other parts of the world. The sheep is a very effective degrader of ecosystems - it eats a wide range of vegetation, it crops it right down to the ground, it ensures that very little can live where sheep are kept on land for long periods, which they are, and it destroys watersheds, because the land no longer has the absorptive capacity, to be able to suck up rain when it falls and then release it slowly. Instead - and this is what, again, we're seeing in many parts of the world - downstream of where sheep heavily graze, the catchments, we see a cycle of drought and flood as the result of rivers flash-flood down into the valleys, and then they dry up because there isn't that slow release from the sponge-like ecosystem which you have before the trees are cut down and the land is heavily grazed.
And what makes it really peculiar in many parts of Europe, less so in Canada, is that conservationists have somehow come to see these grazed-out, burnt-out shells of ecosystems as desirable states of nature. Now I really learnt my ecology in the tropics - I studied zoology, and ecology was a big part of that but it wasn't until I was working in Brazil with conservationists, right at the cutting edge, that I really began to see what the ecosystem could be. And the message I had was very clear, that to protect wildlife you preserve the rain forest against the cattle ranches, which were the greatest threat. Took me a long time to see, coming back to my own country, that we are preserving the cattle ranches against the rain forest.
Laura Lynch: But one other thing you suggested, aside from rewilding the land, is that you also want to see an active participation in reintroducing certain species that had vanished from British ecosystems - wild boar, which have actually made a reappearance, bears, bison even, even elephants?
George Monbiot: Well, elephants not so much in Britain, but on the European continent. I mean, ours, just like yours, was an elephant-dominated ecosystem, of course. In - both in North America and in Europe, we had elephants just about everywhere. You had many species of elephant in North America, in Europe it was just one beast, which lived in temperate forest areas. And our trees here still bear the marks of elephant attack. And so we still live in an elephant-adapted ecosystem, and I feel that, certainly in some of the areas on the
European continent, which are opening up, which are huge - we're looking, potentially, at an area the size of Poland - being vacated by farmers by 2030. Then those are big enough to start bringing back some of our lost megafauna. And we used to have lions, hyenas, hippos, rhinos, elephants... I don't see why we shouldn't bring them back. And the idea really is to kickstart a lot of the missing ecosystem processes, which show us that the natural world is even more complex and fascinating than we imagined.
Laura Lynch: If you do all of that, how certain can you be that it will all come back?
George Monbiot: Well, not everything will come back. Some species are extinct, and will never return. And it's not really a question of coming back, because ecosystems that will emerge, they won't be the same as those that prevailed in the past. It's not an attempt to restore primordial wilderness, which by definition is impossible. It's an attempt to kickstart ecosystem processes again, and that will throw up surprises. There's some very good examples of this. For instance, when wolves were reintroduced in the Yellowstone National Park in 1995, they transformed the whole ecology of the park. We think of wolves as killing animals, and they certainly do, but we were unaware of the extent to which they give life to many more species, and in this case, by driving deer out of parts of the park where they could easily be caught, they ensured that the forests came springing back. The number of migratory birds then rose, because there were more trees, the number of beavers then rose, for the same reason - the dams they created meant that the number of otters rose, the muskrats, the reptiles, the amphibians, the fish, the insects, um, the bald eagles, the ravens rose because they were eating the carrion. Same with the bears. Um, the number of rabbits and mice rose, because the wolves killed the coyotes and that meant there were more hawks and weasels and foxes and badgers. The number of bison rose, because there was more browsing. The whole ecosystem was changed by the wolves, and that's one of those wonderful, serendipitous surprises, which is what, to me, nature should be all about. Nature is not just a collection of species, it's all the weird stuff that happens between those species.
Laura Lynch: You paint such a lovely, romantic, pastoral picture of this -
George Monbiot: Ooh, don't say "pastoral", that's keeping - that means keeping sheep! [They laugh.]
Laura Lynch: Oh, forgive me, I didn't want to talk about sheep again.
George Monbiot: It's all about shepherding...
Laura Lynch: But the fact is, especially in England, when you talk about - and you've also written about reintroducing the mighty beaver, which we well know here in Canada - reintroducing that to Britain, and big cats, you get resistance automatically, don't you, from the farming community.
George Monbiot: Yes, yes, and we have a particular uphill battle here in Britain, because the landowning community is very, very conservative. Even though there's widespread public enthusiasm for bringing back beavers, for instance, and quite a few other species, the place where there's least enthusiasm is the place where people are most powerful, which is those who own the countryside. So, so, the landowners. And it's incredibly concentrated, the ownership of land in this country. And you'll find similar in Canada, but it's not so extreme in Canada - people aren't as afraid of animals as we are, here in Britain.
Laura Lynch: You write - I wanted to get a little bit more into the philosophy of this, and you were just speaking about the delight in the surprises that you find in nature, and you wrote in the book that before you started this project, you were - this phrase you used - "ecologically bored". What do you mean by that?
George Monbiot: We evolved in challenging times, in a world full of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. Um, and we still possess the courage and the fear and the aggression required to navigate that world, but we have very few outlets for those, which don't get us into trouble with other people. And perhaps the greatest physical challenge most of us face is opening a badly-designed packet of nuts. And I don't know about you, but it's just not enough for me. And I find myself sort of scratching at the walls of life, trying to find a way into a wider space beyond. And it's particularly problematic in countries like my own, where there's no wild space, there's very little in the way of interesting, charismatic nature. The nearest I come is kayaking in Cardigan Bay with dolphins - we've got a big population of bottlenose dolphins there - and that's a wonderful, delightful experience. But there aren't many places where you can have experiences like that. And when I roam in other parts of Europe - Slovenia or Romania or the Białowieża Forest in Poland, you come across bison and wolves and bears and the rest of it - there I feel that thrill, that real excitement, which I think is missing from the lives of many of us.
Laura Lynch: But the way you describe it in the book struck me as being, at times, like extreme sports. And, quite frankly, a little heavy on the testosterone. [They laugh.] Particularly when you were discussing, well, what to me was a near-death experience when you were kayaking. Is this, largely, an exploit that is really only appealing to a certain segment of the population? Are you suggesting that this is something that is missing in all of us?
George Monbiot: Mmm. Well, look, I'm not advocating that everyone tries to get themselves killed on a remote Welsh beach. That's - I very nearly managed... I mean, that was a peculiarly stupid adventure, which must rank among the top 200 of my peculiarly stupid adventures. But I do think actually there is a much wider yearning among people. And when I have had experiences which aren't about extreme sports and - well, maybe they're a little bit about testosterone, but, um, not necessarily about testosterone - um, which have tapped into what I believe are a vestigial set of psychological faculties, then it's been like taking the best drug you've ever taken - not that you or your listeners have ever taken any drugs, perhaps that's a really bad analogy, but - it's transformative, it takes you out of yourself and into somewhere else quite different, which is a wonderful place. And having sampled it, my gosh, you want to get back there. And I'll give you two examples of what happened in my case.
One, I was foraging - actually with a Canadian friend, as it happened, but in an English wood - and we were looking for nettles and fungi and things to eat, and there wasn't a lot around. And we came round a corner and there, lying beside a stream, was a dead deer, and it had just died - I don't know why it had died, and it was a very stupid thing that I did next, but that doesn't distinguish it from most other things that I do - I picked it up and I slung it over my shoulders, because I thought "Well, we're foraging, and so, oh-ho, if this isn't forage, what is?" And as soon as I did so, as soon as I felt the warmth of it, because it really had just died, the warmth of it, sort of slung around my shoulders and over my back, I just wanted to roar - I felt like I was eight foot tall, I felt full of excitement and vigour, there's something, it just triggered something off, which I think was a sort of genetic memory, a vestigial memory, um, tapping into that psychological equipment that was once essential in our hunter-gatherer past. And, you know, when I was finally persuaded to put the deer down, I felt a great sense of loss, that something - I'd just found something really special inside myself and I couldn't have it any more.
And similarly, when I was trying to spear flounders in the estuary where I live beside, in Wales, and I'd spent a whole day pursuing them and I hadn't got anywhere, incidentally, but I was wading up this channel, waist-deep in water and concentrating so hard, with this fish-spear, this sort of long trident, a sort of ten-foot trident over my shoulder. And it was suddenly as if I'd passed through a wall, and I had the sense, the undeniable, overwhelming sense that I'd done this a thousand times before, that I was walking through something as familiar to me as my way home.
Laura Lynch: For those of us, though, who either cannot or are more reluctant to experience nature the way you do, who aren't ready to go out foraging in the forest or perhaps fling a deer carcase over their back, how would you think they would experience rewilding?
George Monbiot: Mmm. Well, it's not going to be for everyone. But if, like me, you do sense that there should be more to life than we have, that our lives have become small and shuffling things, that they occupy ever-diminishing circles, then what I want is for people to have the opportunity to get out into somewhere which is completely unordered, unregulated, by contrast to almost everything else in our lives, where you can just feel your chest fill with air and your soul expand, and you can almost feel, as I sometimes do, as if you're about to take flight, because you feel that pure joy and wonder and enchantment, which, well, speaking for myself, I can only find in places which are more or less self-willed, which are not controlled by people.
Laura Lynch: You talk, also, about rewilding the sea as much as rewilding the land. What does it mean, to rewild the sea?
George Monbiot: Mmm. Well, that's even simpler than rewilding the land, because what it does is to say: we're going to take large areas of sea in which there will be no commercial extraction. So there will be no industrial fishing, there will be no dredging, none of the other major commercial activities which take place. And it's amazing how quickly the ecosystem returns, in those cases, how quickly life comes bounding back, because the great thing about marine life is it moves around a lot, it can move back into a void very quickly when the fishing pressure is taken off. And then, what you see is that it's good for everyone. And this is the amazing and also frustrating thing, that when you create large marine reserves, you get what's called a spillover effect, that the fish and the crustaceans and the shellfish inside the reserve, they multiply very quickly, they reach maturity, which means that they produce more fertile eggs, they get bigger, and a lot of those fish and shellfish then spill over into the surrounding seas which aren't protected, and they boost the catches of fisherfolk. So, what's not to like? It seems so obvious.
Laura Lynch: Well, George Monbiot, it is an interesting and very thought-provoking book, and I appreciate you coming in to talk to me about it.
George Monbiot: Thanks very much, Laura, it's my pleasure.
Laura Lynch: Goodbye.
George Monbiot: Bye bye.