It was a fantastic
talk and people really wanted to ask him questions. He was asked about the badger cull. He said on every front we are going
backwards, further away from this vision but when you see the possibilities of
rewilding it then changes your whole perspective of what you are trying to
achieve ecologically and rather than all getting bogged down with battles of
individual species you start to assail government with a complete and coherent
ecosystem.
They’ve got rid of all
the large predators, they’ve got rid of all the large herbivores and there now trying
to get rid of the small predators as well, it’s just insanity. What do you expect him to say, that
badger culls are a good idea? He
goes on “the last government spent £49 million pounds on finding out if it was
a good idea and they found out that it was a really bad idea, so let’s do
it. Totally, totally stupid. We’re just going down the food chain,
that’s what we’re doing with policy.
All that’s going to be left is the cockroaches and us.
Someone else asks if there is a bigger
scheme going on with the economic system as well as the ecological system, are
they working with the same logic?
George says that
logic might not be the word but there is an ethos that unquestionable governs
both processes where it is all about short term maximisation production and
what we’re looking at is economic long term processes, and especially if you
want to maintain your tropic layers, very long processes which requires a
holistic understanding of the system you are looking at whereas neo-liberal
whether it is in farming or conservation or whereas it is in the banking sector
is to break every thing up and to flog it off.
The horrifying thing now is with this whole market and
ecosystem services and natural capital they are trying to do the same to the
natural world. One of the reports
from the Natural Capital committee, which is a terrifying organisation set up
by the government, talking about the secureisation of environmental assets,
bio-diversity, water catchments, soil carbon and all the rest of it, these can
be split into different assert classes and then traded independently. They literally want to do what they did
to the city, and didn’t that end up well?
There are talking
about derivatives. Even calling it
natural capital, we used to call it nature, is horrible neo-liberal language
that destroys it and takes the value out of it. It is exactly the same process.
-Are there things in Britain where you
see some forward motion on these issues and isn’t it about time you did a TED
talk?
The second question is easier to
answer; he did one a few months back and has only just been released to the
public on the Internet.
The first question is harder. There is stuff going on there is stuff
happening. The real wedge issue is
farm subsidies. He’s not calling
for the instant rewilding of farms because he recognises that clash of values,
he doesn’t want to eliminate that wonderful farming culture. But any change in subsides would change
the agenda more than anything else.
Remember that this is our money.
It’s amazing just how quiet we’ve been about the spending of our
money. You tweak the system a tiny
bit and everything opens up. What
I want to do with rewilding is to unlock people’s imagination and let us think
for ourselves and getting out of that neo-liberal paradigm where you are put in
a box and are forced to stop thinking like that. We’ve got to ask ourselves is what do we want, never mind
what they are offering, what do we want?
-Is there anyone ready to take it on?
Yes, he’s talking to a big NGO who are
extremely keen on this, but it’s very big and slow so at the same time he’s in
a smaller group to actually do it.
Already there are some places that do it. Trees For Life in Scotland is by far the most impressive and
interesting. Quite a remarkable
organisation and Alan Watson Featherstone decided to restore the Caledonian
Forest. He’s a man of persuasive
powers and has lots of landowners on board with this through public
subscription he raised the money to buy a ten thousand acre estate. What I want to see is a lot more of
it. It’s a great model. The current system is failing even by
it’s own terms.
-If trophic cascade is the top layer
effecting the bottom layers than does it gives justification of Thatcher’s idea
of trickle down effect?
There’s an analogy there but not an
answer. He begins to talk about
fear in people toward animals.
Wolf folk tale are all about them being dangerous and swapping bodies
with human beings, there’s a interesting thing happening here. There are 60,000 wolves in North
America. The amount of people
killed by wolves is 0. The number
of people killed by vending machines is 10. Vending machines are more dangerous than wolves. The reason why they inspire fear is
because they are so much like us.
They have the same social intelligence. They look at you as if they understand what you are
thinking. That’s what terrifying. People have this fear of animals that
they should get over. Engaging
with the natural world is a good place to start.
Does he think if there will be a
competition between renewable and rewilding?
Some rewilders object very strongly
with wind turbines but he thinks they should be used, as they are far less
damaging than any non-renewable energy.
You are going to have to have some compromise. Increasingly he would like to see them as optional but it
could be quite useful. You could
declare your wind farm as a marine nature reserve with no fishing in
between. Unfortunate the burying
of cables is so efficient now that you can but why not declare it? The future is going to be offshore with
wind farm. There’s an issues with
solar much less than with some places.
It’s not an easy question to answer but there are going to be clashes.
How does he use the term Gaia?
“I’m talking about specially about the
Gaia hypothesis, which conceives nature as geo-bio-physiology where basically
the biosphere and the geosphere and the atmosphere control each other and
regulate each other. You can use
that as a launch pad through a spiritual lens, a evolutionary lens, and an
ecological lens. What’s
interesting about the Gaia hypothesis opens up the imagination. The whole point of neo-liberalism is that
you close down the imagination. If
you close down the imagination you close down the opposition. What I like about the Gaia hypostasis,
there are issues about it that I would like to see worked on, what I like about
it is that it obliges us to look at the world in a different way”.
Where does he go if he wants a bit of
fun?
“Oh Alton Towers
obviously” much laughter “for me it’s the sea. Sea and salt marshes.
Salt marshes are as close to a cell in the nucleus system they are being
constantly renewed and changed and the rivers are meandering and doing their
own thing and they attracted a fascinating cycle of life. And also the sea in my sea kayak and
snorkeling. You can create very
large marine no take zones then you get this rapid restoration. You get a very strong spill over into
other seas. We’ve got 0.0.1% of
our territory and all the rest of it is just open takes. It’s bad for us but it’s also the
fishing industry would be better off that’s what so stupid about it. If they had no take zones they would
actually have a future. It’s a
sign of how perverse the system has got that doesn’t even look at the rational
economic actors when it comes to the policy makers, even people making the best
decisions in the most narrow of economic terms. It’s just macho fixation of
extractive industries and everywhere has to be exploit and if you don’t then
it’s a insult to your manhood.
It’s testeria that drives this extraordinary unnecessary
destruction. It’s my interest in
rewilding because it is the imaginative process that is as important as the
ecological process. First of all
knowing what you want then understanding the context around what it is you
want, understanding what it was and what it could be. Paleoecology is the study
of past ecosystems, which is as crucial to an understanding of our own. It’s a key to an enchanted kingdom to which
we may pass, to which we may return.
To see it and to understand it, to know where we have come from and to
know where we are going, that has been the task in writing this book. That has enabled me to understand a
whole lot of other stuff that was previously opaque to me and that is partly
what I mean when I talk about the rewilding of us the rewilding of human
beings.
The is about
unlocking a locked down imagination.
Unlocking as a result of a locked down diversity of experience to which
we have been denied, a diversity of emotion, a diversity of intellectual
development, a diversity of life, from which we have been shut out. Contesting that we simultaneously start
to contest everything that has gone wrong in the natural world. The two process are attached to each
other. It’s by understanding that
it’s not just about fighting against things, it’s not just about opposition,
it’s got to be about proposition and it’s about taking responsibility for creating
our own agenda, creating our own proposals, our own decisions for what we want
rather than choosing from a limited list offered by politicians and by the
mainstream ecologists.
In some
ways you can’t be part of the rewilding agenda without in some respect to
rewild yourself. It almost forces
us to ask us whom we are, to ask questioning the boundaries of our humanity, to
start asking what it is to be a human being. It’s a bit like the Gaia theory even if there was nothing in
it would still be a worthwhile exercise, it would reinstitute the ecology of
the mind. I believe once we’ve
done that we can do the dual processes to recover the psychic, which is
desperately required, and physical recovery of the ecology.
What we’ve sort to
do in environment movement is this constant appeasement of politics and
mainstream economy is to shut down and conpartmentalise our imagination and our
own lives in order to fit in and in order to be taken seriously. Let’s not be taken seriously, let’s
stop be so damned reasonable, lets be wildly unreasonable and unreasonably
wild.
A cheer goes up
with much clapping.
The thing about
the imagination got to me. I know
he’s quoted from Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised before
and I ask him if he thinks there is a problem with engaging with critical
thinking in this country?
“I do, yes”
I’ve thought about
it a lot and one thing keeps coming back to me is the account of Oliver
Goldsmith that he told us about.
Oliver Goldsmith,
the novelist, in 1776 stood on a cliff watching the herring come in which made
the sea black, behind them cod, spear dog, tope, blue sharks, mako sharks,
thresher sharks, great white sharks, behind them the dolphins and the
porpoises, behind them the sperm whales and the fin whales. Is it time to have that again? I think so.
Feral is out now.
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