Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by foxo_cube
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot
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.