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A review by georgina_bawden
Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot
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.