Dig down a few metres beneath the fountains in Trafalgar Square and you will find the remains of elephants, lions and hippopotami.
These giant beasts grazed, stalked and wallowed through British rainforests just over 100,000 years ago. In evolutionary time this is the blink of an eye and George Monbiot, in his new book Feral, makes a powerful argument for their (eventual) reintroduction.
Monbiot’s call for “rewilding”, the restoration of biodiversity through reintroducing large predators and allowing nature to run its course, is a hopeful vision for the future. At a time when environmentalists are gripped with apocalyptic visions of climate change, Monbiot’s call to focus on biodiversity reminds us that there will be no “end times”. The planet and the natural world will continue to exist. The key question is whether will be able to engineer an ecology robust enough to allow the survival of human civilisation into the 22nd century and beyond.
The pressing question for the environmentalist movement is how to carve out a future that will be most resilient to climate change. Monbiot’s call for rewilding seems to provide some of the answer.
His work is based on a recent discovery in ecological science called trophic cascade. The trophic level of an organism is the position it holds in a food chain. Plants, herbivores, omnivores, top predators all occupy different trophic levels. Traditionally it was thought that each level rested on the one below. Remove one level and the levels below will thrive, the levels above will adapt or die out. This view was mistaken.
There is now a large body of evidence for trophic cascade, the process where animals in high trophic levels support thriving populations further down the food chain. The best example of this is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in 1995, 70 years after they had been exterminated. When they were reintroduced many of the streams and river banks were bare due to grazing by elk (red deer). The reintroduction of wolves changed the elks’ grazing habits. The elk no longer grazed openly on the river banks, and this allowed the river bank plants to grow.
Within six years, riverside trees had quintupled in size. Fish populations boomed as there were more shady, cool areas for feeding. There was a increase in the number of songbirds who found nests in the trees. Beaver populations grew from one colony in 1996 to twelve in 2009. Beavers in turn slow down rivers, reduce erosion, ensure cleaner water and create small bogs and wetlands. This creates niches for otters, muskrats, fish, frogs, and reptiles.
The wolves also reduced the number of coyotes. That increased the number of small mammals (mice, weasels etc.), providing prey for smaller hunters such as foxes, badgers and hawks. The wolves had a positive impact on the bear population. Bears feed on the deer carcases left by the wolves and berries which became more abundant as the deer stopped eating sapling trees.
The reintroduction of a single species had a myriad of positive effects. Most surprisingly the rivers changed course (due to less soil erosion) and the soil itself became more fertile (due to changes in the behaviour of grazing animals). The web of life in Yellowstone Park is much richer for this reintroduction.
Monbiot believes that many centuries of human activity have created barren landscapes where only a few species of plants and animals survive and many become extinct. He describes the “sheepwrecked” British uplands as “deserts” where all but a handful of grasses, shrubs and ferns have survived the sheep. Remove the sheep and all manner of plants and animals would begin to thrive. Remove the sheep and reintroduce missing species like wolves, beaver and wild boar, and within a few decades the British uplands would be heaving with species that are currently under threat of extinction.
According to the Centre for Biodiversity set up after the Rio Earth Summit in 1983 we are “experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs”. The numbers are disputed but the trend is unmistakable. Human activity is destroying habitats, introducing non-indigenous species (sheep, grey squirrels etc.) and driving climate change, all at the cost of biodiversity.
The scale of this destruction has led among conservationists to what Monbiot calls “shifting baseline syndrome”. He argues that most conservationists take the state of the natural world in their childhood as their baseline and see their task as trying to recreate that golden age. This tendency will be familiar to militants in the labour movement who after years of defeat see the aspirations of the movement dwindle to the most uninspiring and paltry demands. With every defeat the baseline shifts towards an ever increasing poverty of expectation.
The shifting baseline is most apparent in the biodiversity of the sea. It is estimated that fish stocks are down over 94% globally since records began in 1889. At this time small sailing boats, with primitive equipment and no fish-finding technology landed twice the weight of fish that the modern fishing fleets land today. Colonists in the Americas wrote about rivers that were so full of salmon that you would shoot a gun into the water and pick out your evening meal. In the 19th century there was a reef of scallop shells in the North Sea that was the size of Wales. The size of fish is also in decline. The average weight of tuna has dropped by half in 20 years. Yet the UK’s National Ecosystem Assessment states that around half of UK finfish stocks are at “full reproductive capacity”.
Monbiot argues that the dwindling populations of large fish and sea mammals are reducing the populations of smaller fish and plankton. There are also less obvious global consequences. Just as the Yellowstone wolves had an effect on soil composition and river course, Monbiot argues that the dwindling whale populations are having an effect on global warming.
Whales feed at depth and defecate near the surface. This recycles large amounts of nitrogen and iron which fertilises the surface water and leads to big plankton blooms. The plankton removes carbon dioxide from the air, sinks into the deep ocean and is one of earth’s major carbon sinks. By some estimates whales remove tens of millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
Monbiot believes rewilding is good not just for the plants and animals but also for humans. Following on from Jay Griffiths’s new book Kith, he argues that the destruction of biodiversity is part and parcel of the enclosures – as a historic event and as an ongoing process of privatisation of land. The loss of the commons has had a devastating effect on children’’ right to outside play, which in turn is associated with a whole range of physical and mental health problems.
With these basic principles Monbiot sets out his strategy. The UK’s National Ecological Assessment calls for 30% of seas to be protected from fishing. Big predators still exist in the sea and the trophic cascade effects will occur if we just left the seas alone. Where protected areas have been created and properly enforced there has been a dramatic rise in the fish populations. Around Lundy Island (one of Britain’s only reserves) lobster populations trebled in just 18 months after the creation of the reserve. In the 2% of world’s seas that are protected fish populations have on average quadrupled – and some of these reserves are just a few years old. Yet the large fishing corporations – against their own long-term interests and despite a petition of 500,000 people – have successfully blocked protection for all but 0.01% of Britain’s territorial waters.
Having overfished European waters, the big fishing firms are now working their way through West Africa’s fish stocks with the help of 1.9 billion Euros in EU subsidies. Monbiot quotes research that claims the failure to implement adequate protection zones is costing the EU 82,000 jobs and 3 billion Euros a year.
On dry land missing species will need to reintroduced before humanity steps back and allows the rewilding process to run its course. Much on the British uplands have been desertified by sheep and deer. If sheep (a species that has its evolutionary roots in ancient Mesopotamia) were removed from the British uplands and top predators were reintroduced, much of the land would revert to woodland.
Few proletarians would argue with reclaiming the hunting grounds of the super-rich, but would we need to give up lamb chops? And does Monbiot want to dispossess small sheep farmers and their rural way of life?
Monbiot has argued elsewhere that we need to reduce the amount of animal products we eat and radically transform farming methods for simple environmental reasons. Here he makes a convincing case that sheep products would be better sourced elsewhere than the Welsh hills.
On average sheep farmers in Wales receive £53,000 in EU subsidies, which they spend in order to produce just £33,000 of income. In effect, sheep farming costs them £20,000 a year. Most farmers keep sheep because it is a rule of the EU subsidy that the land cannot revert to nature.
Farmers do not have to produce anything to receive the subsidy, but they do have to artificially maintain the land in its desertified state — by grazing, ploughing or otherwise chopping down signs of resurgent life.
Monbiot argues that this rule should be dropped and farmers should be free to do nothing if they want to. The subsidy should be capped to stop the large landowners cashing in on this rule.
In Britain 69% of the land is owned by 0.6% of the population. A cap in the subsidy could be the first step to bringing this land back into common ownership. Farmers that did allow their land to rewild may see other economic benefits. The reintroduction of white-tailed sea eagles to the Isle of Mull has created a £5 million tourist industry.
Monbiot’s program is reformist but its strength lies in addressing areas of politics that are often ignored by the city-dwelling British left. It combines a class struggle against the landowners and fishing barons with practical efforts to access and rewild areas that have been reclaimed for us commoners. The campaign for sustainable fishing, like so many environmental problems, can only be won by an international working-class movement that can assert an alternative logic to that dictated by capitalist national competition.
In our world where capitalist relations have seeped into all the pores of our world, the rewilding project is a new way to conceive of the struggle for control over the means of production. Capitalist agricultural and fishing methods are inefficient and ecologically unsustainable. If they are allowed to continue they will threaten the foundation of human life on earth. The anarchy of the market and perverse state subsidies prop up a anachronistic landowning class and fishing empires that are destroying the conditions of their continued existence.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx calls for the abolition of the division between town and country. It is a puzzling demand that is politely ignored nowadays. But perhaps alienation from nature was something that was felt very acutely by 19th century socialists and is part of our shifting baseline that this sense of loss is now forgotten. Feral should be the start of a conversation about how we can reimagine a future in which productive powers can be directed democratically for the benefit of people and planet.
The struggle to win control of the means of production from the capitalist and landowning classes may result in us ceding that much of that control back to nature.
