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liberrydude's review against another edition
3.0
I heard the author on NPR so I had to read the book. The book is somewhat disjointed. It's got passion but too much info. But still read it. It's very informative. You learn about trophic cascades and shifting balance syndrome among other things. Monbiot is a revolutionary, an iconoclast, a pragmatist, and someone who should be in charge of making things happen. If you think the US is messed up in terms of its conservation you should look at the UK which Monbiot mercilessly grills over its inane policies which do everything to achieve the reverse of what's needed. Although this book is pretty UK centric it's discouraging to see what constitutes management and conservation policy. Monbiot points out that much of what we call the natural world is not so but a manmade construct that's relative to our point of view or time. In the UK an obscenely small percent of the population own 69% of the land! The landed gentry work against the land with their focus on hunting. The farmer's lobby with the focus on neatness and removing woods, marshes as well as the pre-eminence of sheep which destroy the land- does nothing but make the land worse for wear. Monbiot likens some areas of Wales to a desert: no trees and the omnipresent sheep eating everything so there's no roots or grass. And they wonder why there are so many floods in the UK now according to Monbiot. Just a very interesting rant on the arrogance of man and how even his best attempt at management screws everything up. Leave Mother Nature alone and let her be and we'll all be better off is Monbiot's message.
joseph_nevnev's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
oliviamango's review
adventurous
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Changed my view of the world
poopdealer's review against another edition
5.0
one thing i dont get about environmentalist books is they seem to all really love including random topics and personal stories that have absolutely nothing to do with nature. idk why but they addicted to doing this. a second habit im really not a fan of in this book is how he starts so many stories with incomplete information to try to add suspense. i have no idea where this is going and none of the description has any weight because youve left out basic grounding information. sometimes in this book, these two things are combined and you get a story that feels hollow but sounds intense which also ends up being about nothing. my main problem with this book are minor stylistic / editing choices like these. it's frustrating because he can be an expressive writer at times but there's definitely fluff. maybe this was just me getting used to his writing, but i found the first 80 pages especially annoying to read (up until the beaver section lol). this book isnt bad at all though and it's great compared to other environmentalist writing. i liked the sections on ocean life towards the end the most
kieranyes's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death
Minor: Genocide
georgina_bawden's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book - I completely steamed through it and couldn't stop talking about it. It is genuinely the kind of book that shifts your perspective, even if you go in (like me) thinking you're probably already on board with the arguments for rewilding.
The opening does read, as some have mentioned elsewhere in reviews here, like the author is having a midlife crisis. He tries to set the scene for his exploration into the topic of rewilding, but to me this came off very masculine and put me off - I was worried the book would continue in this vein (for example the author talks about his time with the Maasai warriors and how he wished he could have had that life because it was so free - and literally details the negotiation of a bride price on the same page). He also talks a bit in the early chapters about rewilding human life by giving us more freedom, and considers that our freedoms have been curtailed since the days we were free to dehumanise other groups of people. He does decide this is ultimately a good thing (!) but as a queer woman the entire discussion was off-putting. After all I have never felt free in the way he describes, and people like me have never been freer than they are right now, when people like the author are "curtailed" from othering us...
That said, the rest of the book was fascinating, and when the author did return to the idea of rewilding human life it was more with the sense that considering our natural world, and thinking about what it was, how it came to be as it is now, and how it could be in the future, enabled us to reconnect to nature.
So I could have done without the weird macho take on feeling "wilder" but I would recommend sticking with the book beyond the first few paragraphs. It is really fascinating.
The opening does read, as some have mentioned elsewhere in reviews here, like the author is having a midlife crisis. He tries to set the scene for his exploration into the topic of rewilding, but to me this came off very masculine and put me off - I was worried the book would continue in this vein (for example the author talks about his time with the Maasai warriors and how he wished he could have had that life because it was so free - and literally details the negotiation of a bride price on the same page). He also talks a bit in the early chapters about rewilding human life by giving us more freedom, and considers that our freedoms have been curtailed since the days we were free to dehumanise other groups of people. He does decide this is ultimately a good thing (!) but as a queer woman the entire discussion was off-putting. After all I have never felt free in the way he describes, and people like me have never been freer than they are right now, when people like the author are "curtailed" from othering us...
That said, the rest of the book was fascinating, and when the author did return to the idea of rewilding human life it was more with the sense that considering our natural world, and thinking about what it was, how it came to be as it is now, and how it could be in the future, enabled us to reconnect to nature.
So I could have done without the weird macho take on feeling "wilder" but I would recommend sticking with the book beyond the first few paragraphs. It is really fascinating.
foxo_cube's review against another edition
adventurous
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
There are two important things I took away from this book. First: Monbiot fucking hates sheep. Second: you know what, I kind of get it, even if I think his wrath is a little overblown.
It's funny, actually, because now I do really notice how many places in the UK that are protected as sites of natural beauty and so on are just, like, fields. I was already of the opinion that there should be more forests (or, more accurately, less destruction of forests - new growth forests have less biodiversity because there's all sorts of exciting symbiotic shit going on in the ones that have stood for centuries) but I was shocked to find out that most places that are "protected" allow grazing animals, which seems to very clearly go against the whole "protection" thing.
Turns out that there's a whole lot of politics going on when it comes to ecology. This book covers a lot of that pretty well, even dedicating a chapter to the use of the concept of rewilding by Nazis as an excuse for genocide and displacement of people, which is a very important inclusion - one thing that Monbiot stresses is that any sort of rewilding should be done with respect to human life.
Some parts of the book are basically just memoir, which I think <i>could</i> have worked better than it did. Instead of illustrating his points, a lot of the time those segments felt a little masturbatory. I think there is merit in this concept of "ecological boredom" - essentially, the idea that people need to engage with nature for their own enrichment and happiness, and that they get depressed and bored without it even if they don't realise it - but he mostly just says "I was experiencing ecological boredom but then I went on this epic cool adventure and I felt like a big man" and doesn't really delve further into it beyond personal anecdote. Ironically, he has big city-guy energy as a result.
Still, there's a real love of nature that shines through everything, and it's contagious! There are discusses of efforts at rewilding around the world - both those with promise and those that are flawed or misdirected - and the tendency of people to think of the landscapes of their youth to be the ideal, thus directing energy towards <i>conserving</i> a static ecosystem instead of encouraging nature to find the best balance for itself.
The book is very UK-centric, which makes sense given that the author is British, and paints an image of a Britain that could be significantly more ecologically colourful than the one we live in. It'd be nice to see that come to fruition one day.
It's funny, actually, because now I do really notice how many places in the UK that are protected as sites of natural beauty and so on are just, like, fields. I was already of the opinion that there should be more forests (or, more accurately, less destruction of forests - new growth forests have less biodiversity because there's all sorts of exciting symbiotic shit going on in the ones that have stood for centuries) but I was shocked to find out that most places that are "protected" allow grazing animals, which seems to very clearly go against the whole "protection" thing.
Turns out that there's a whole lot of politics going on when it comes to ecology. This book covers a lot of that pretty well, even dedicating a chapter to the use of the concept of rewilding by Nazis as an excuse for genocide and displacement of people, which is a very important inclusion - one thing that Monbiot stresses is that any sort of rewilding should be done with respect to human life.
Some parts of the book are basically just memoir, which I think <i>could</i> have worked better than it did. Instead of illustrating his points, a lot of the time those segments felt a little masturbatory. I think there is merit in this concept of "ecological boredom" - essentially, the idea that people need to engage with nature for their own enrichment and happiness, and that they get depressed and bored without it even if they don't realise it - but he mostly just says "I was experiencing ecological boredom but then I went on this epic cool adventure and I felt like a big man" and doesn't really delve further into it beyond personal anecdote. Ironically, he has big city-guy energy as a result.
Still, there's a real love of nature that shines through everything, and it's contagious! There are discusses of efforts at rewilding around the world - both those with promise and those that are flawed or misdirected - and the tendency of people to think of the landscapes of their youth to be the ideal, thus directing energy towards <i>conserving</i> a static ecosystem instead of encouraging nature to find the best balance for itself.
The book is very UK-centric, which makes sense given that the author is British, and paints an image of a Britain that could be significantly more ecologically colourful than the one we live in. It'd be nice to see that come to fruition one day.