Rewilding the Future: Part Two

 

Even if subsidies continue as they are it is estimated that between 2000 and 2030, 30 million hectares on the Continent of Europe will be vacated by farmers despite the best efforts to keep them on the land because the young people do not want to stay.  Whole swathes are being reforested.  30 million hectares is about the size of Poland.  It starts to become a bit unambitious to talk of beavers, boars, wolves, lynxes, moose, bison and wolverines.  Why not consider the return of the lost megafauna?  Lions, hyenas, hippos, Asian elephants, black rhinos, why shouldn’t everyone have a Serengeti on their doorstep?  Why is conservation so unambitious, so irrational, so anally retentive and so ecologically illiterate?

  This is also about the rewilding of our own lives.  He’s not talking about giving up civilization but rather having places where there is self-willed nature that is allowed to develop under it’s own steam in which we may roam.  Places where we may escaped the ordered, regulated, buttoned down, manicured, comfortable, cushioned existence in which we are forced into for the rest of our lives and experience the wild thrill of seeing nature in raw and unmediated state both on sea and on land.  Seeing that is an experience qualifiedly different to seeing any other part of the countryside, something which is enthralling, engaging and involves us in ecstasy and it begins to reignite those buried fires.

  He goes kayaking in Cardigan Bay and one time he went into a ten-foot swell, which was a lumpy nasty jumbled sea and there’s no safe landing and he was trying to get back in without much luck.  Behind him he hears the sound of a giant wave and braced himself for the splash but no water comes.  Under the shaft of his paddle a hooked grey fin rose out of the water all scarred and pitted.  He knows what it was but he felt fear mingled exhilaration then he turned and this blue dolphin jumped over him and as it jumped it made eye contact with him.  If anything inspired him to write Feral then that was.

  If we allow rewilding take place in nature than we can rewild ourselves.  This is something that environmentalism can finally offer, hope.  Rewilding gives us positive environmentalism that can revitalise all the other environmental campaigns.  When he tells people about rewilding they will say “well why are we putting up with this nonsense with consumption and climate change lets sort it out so we can get on with the rewilding.  We have a goal now.  An ounce of hope weighs more than ten times then that in despair.  What I hope is that our silent spring can be turned into a raucous summer.