In his book Feral, George Monbiot presents a new and positive vision of environmentalism, no longer based on the conservation of nature but on the restoration of ancient ecological mechanisms.
Can you imagine elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, lions and hyenas roaming the forests of Europe? Probably not. George Monbiot, on the other hand, can, and in his book Feral (published in 2013 but only translated into Italian in 2018, published by Piano B edizioni) he shares his vision, taking us on a journey between past and future, whose ultimate destination is an exciting dream: the rewilding of Europe and the return of its long-extinct megafauna.
According to the Gaia Hypothesis, our planet is a living organism, interconnected in all its parts, capable of self-regulation. Monbiot, a British environmentalist, writer and journalist, believes that this was indeed once the case, before our species upset the balance. "Before its food webs were reduced to tatters, the planet was controlled by animals and plants to a greater extent than we can imagine today. The evidence in support of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis seems, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating."
The process of rewilding, according to the British writer, implies above all that humanity takes a step back and scales down its anthropocentric vision. "Rewilding, to me, means resisting the urge to control nature: it is allowing nature to find its own way – writes Monbiot – it implies the reintroduction of absent animals and plants. At sea, rewilding means abolishing intensive fishing and other forms of exploitation." Monbiot therefore advocates a self-determination of nature, no longer governed by human management but by its own processes. This makes the process all the more fascinating, since no one knows with any certainty what will emerge from it. "Rewilding has no end points, no view about what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of species should look like. It lets nature decide. While environmentalism often looks to the past, rewilding of this kind looks to the future."
According to the author of Feral, rewilding would not constitute an attempt to restore the ancient ecosystems that have been destroyed, but rather to allow ecological mechanisms to start moving again and to follow their own course, whatever that may be. "Rewilding, unlike conservationism, has no fixed objective: it is not directed by human managers but by natural processes. The primary purpose of rewilding is to restore ecological interactions and dynamics to the greatest possible extent. In other words, the ecological principle behind rewilding is the restoration of what ecologists call trophic diversity." For this reason, Monbiot is wary of an overly conservative environmentalist approach. "In countries like mine, the environmental movement, however well-intentioned, has sought to freeze living systems in time. It has tried to manage nature as one tends a garden." Thanks to rewilding, even impoverished ecosystems such as those of Europe could once again become abundant and captivating, and make wildlife accessible to everyone.
The traditional environmentalist vision has often placed the emphasis on the renunciations and sacrifices to be made in the name of the environment — reducing meat consumption, driving less, consuming less. Monbiot instead highlights the advantages rather than the disadvantages, promising us a new and exciting world. "This book offers new freedoms in exchange for those we have sought to curtail. It envisages vast areas of land and sea self-determining, repopulated by wildlife that has been absent from those places, in which we could wander freely. But, far more importantly, this book offers hope. Twentieth-century environmentalism envisaged a silent spring in which the further degradation of the biosphere seemed inevitable. Rewilding offers the hope of a raucous summer, in which, at least in some parts of the world, the destructive processes have gone into reverse." The ecological revolution theorised by Monbiot, in short, aims to improve the environment in order to offer a tangible benefit to people, not in the name of an abstract concept.
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Monbiot does not propose confiscating productive land from people in order to return it to nature, but rather leaving rewilding to those low-productivity areas where agriculture survives only thanks to subsidies. "Some people see rewilding as a retreat by people from nature. I see it as a re-engagement, as a greater opportunity for people to come into contact with, and to love, the natural world."
The author of the essay, by his own admission, was prey to what he calls "ecological boredom," and in an attempt to escape it he sought to make his life wilder. Monbiot believes that many of us, deep down, desire a fiercer and less predictable ecosystem. "Knowing what will happen next has perhaps been the dominant need of materially complex societies. Yet, having attained this condition, or nearly so, we have been rewarded with a collection of unmet needs. We have privileged security over experience: in doing so we have gained a great deal, but we have lost just as much." Among what we have lost is, precisely, a more unpredictable, exciting and dangerous life.
Feral puts forward incendiary ideas, and the most visionary of these is without doubt that of a hypothetical reintroduction of elephants into Europe. Monbiot mentions the hypothesis that many European trees and shrubs may have evolved to resist attacks by elephants. "The straight-tusked elephant, a relative of the species that still lives in Asia today, was present in Europe until around 40,000 years ago — a mere tick of the evolutionary clock. It was most likely hunted to extinction. If the evidence is as compelling as it appears, our ecosystems would have adapted to elephants." The writer's suggestion is almost a provocation, yet it plays (successfully) on our sense of the fantastical, tickling our imagination. "Even if these speculations do not lead to the reintroduction of elephants and rhinoceroses, do they not make the ordinary a little more astonishing? The idea that our most familiar trees adapted to elephants, that in their shadows we can glimpse the great beasts alongside which human beings evolved, that the traces of these animals can be found in every park and avenue and tree-lined street, suffuses the world with new wonders."
The restoration of the natural mechanisms we have long suppressed is no mirage and, despite the still immense anthropogenic impact, it is already under way. In some parts of the world, nature is indeed returning to places from which it had been banished; one estimate cited by Monbiot predicts that by 2030 farmers across the European continent will have abandoned around thirty million hectares of land. Most European countries today have large areas of self-determining territory. "The areas that agriculture will vacate could be large enough to allow the reintroduction not only of wolves, bears, lynxes and bison, but also of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, lions and hyenas, if only the people of this continent wanted it. While nature retreats from other parts of the world, Europe — the first continent to lose its megafauna and much of its mesofauna — could, through rewilding, become one of the biologically richest regions on earth. What we have not yet understood is that we may be on the verge of witnessing a tumultuous European summer." Something is changing and tomorrow promises wonders; we need only have the courage to imagine it and to open the cage in which we have tried to confine nature.