Ian Short

This is a wonderful book, beautifully written, about rewilding the United Kingdom. It presents convincing arguments about how allowing the countryside to revert to a wild state will increase biodiversity, and these arguments are interspersed with autobiographical stories from the author that show his passion for the subject, which is infectious.

Monbiot  considers rewilding to be the process of ‘permitting ecological processes to resume’ and of ‘resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way’. In the UK, we just can’t leave nature alone; we either graze it by sheep until there’s very little left, chop it down or burn it. As Monbiot says, ‘It is as if conservationists in the Amazon had decided to protect the cattle ranches, rather than the rainforest.’ This principle resonates with me: I visit the Lake District reasonably regularly and I’m struck by the observation that I see less wildlife in the Lake District than I do in Milton Keynes. Actually, I may well see more wildlife on the M6 than I do in the Lake District.

The author also considers rewilding to involve bringing ourselves closer to nature ‘to escape from ecological boredom’. Again, I relate to this idea. My family is trying to lead a wilder life. Maybe we’ll start by leaving the children in the woods for the night – sounds crazy now, but some interrupted nights I would be up for it.

Rewilding is also about bringing back species: beavers, wolves, lynx, wild boar and so on. That’s the most exciting part! I hadn’t realised that elephants and hippos were once found in the UK. Elephants became extinct around 11,000 years ago, hunted by humans. It’s suggested that many of the features of native trees in the UK evolved through interactions with elephants; for example, the capacity of certain trees to regrow so well when they’ve been mangled (hawthorns come to mind). Monbiot gives lots of examples of how large animals give balance to their environment. He says, ‘In some cases they have changed not only the ecosystem but also the nature of the soil, the behaviour of rivers, the chemistry of the oceans and even the composition of the atmosphere.’

Monbiot lays a lot blame for the poor state of our countryside on sheep. Basically, they munch all the plants to the ground, so there is little room for wildlife, apart from a very  few species. The sheep are supported by massive farm subsidies: we pay to ruin our countryside as part of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which is destroying countryside all over Europe. The UK does worst out of it though; tree cover in the UK is about 12% compared to 35% overall in Europe.

There is also a chapter on rewilding the sea. I’ve often had the following thoughts about the sea. Humans have had significant impact on the natural world on land for hundreds, thousands of years: chopping, burning, building, eating, and so on. But until a few hundred years ago, we couldn’t impact on the sea in nearly the same way. We could fish, build dams on rivers, poor pollution into it, but not nearly on the same scale with which we could damage the land – after all, we can’t easily get to the bottom of oceans, and we can’t easily build on it. However, the situation has changed in recent times as fishing has developed and pollution increased. Now, these days, we are able to massacre the ocean. Our underwater crimes are far more disguised than our land crimes. We can drag trawlers over the sea bed annihilating life for the sake of catching some fish. We wouldn’t do quite the same over a forest. And many of the fish we eat are critically endangered.

Monbiot quotes someone who wrote in 1776 that the arrival of a typical body of herring in the UK ‘divided into distinct columns, of five or six miles in length, and three or four broad; while the water before them curls up, as if forced out of its bed… the whole water seems alive; and is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the number seems inexhaustible’. In Monbiot’s words, the 1776 author observed that ‘these shoals were harried by swarms of dolphins, sharks, fin and sperm whales, in British waters, within sight of the shore. The herring were followed by bluefin and longfin tuna, blue, porbeagle, thresher, mako and occasional great white sharks, as well as innumerable cod, spurdog, tope and smoothhound. On some parts of the seabed the eggs of the herring lay six feet deep.’  It is accounts such as this that make me realise how pitiful our wildlife now is in comparison. The rewilding project aims to reverse this decline.

There are some positive rewilding projects out there. Trees for Life in Scotland are attempting to establish a massive network of forests based around the Caledonian Forest. Ellie and I joined one of their volunteering projects before we had children. There is also the charity Rewilding Britain.