Feral - Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding

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“Feral - Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding” [Book]

“Feral - Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding” is a book authored by George Monbiot, published in October 2013 by Allen Lane, Penguin Press, ISBN 978-1846147487.

Introduction

The author’s website introduces the book with the following words:

"Feral is the lyrical and gripping story of George Monbiot’s efforts to re-engage with nature and discover a new way of living. He shows how, by restoring and rewilding our damaged ecosystems on land and at sea, we can bring wonder back into our lives.

Making use of some remarkable scientific discoveries, Feral lays out a new, positive environmentalism, in which nature is allowed to find its own way. From the seas of north Wales, where he kayaks among feeding frenzies of dolphins and seabirds, to the forests of Eastern Europe, where lynx stalk and packs of wolves roam, George Monbiot shows how rewilding could repair the living planet, creating ecosystems in post-industrial nations as profuse and captivating as any around the world. Already, large wild animals are beginning to spread back across Europe, and fin whales, humpback whales and bluefin tuna are returning to the seas around Britain.

Feral is a work of hope and of revelation; a wild and bewitching adventure that argues for a mass restoration of the natural world – and a powerful call for us to reclaim our own place in it."

Manifesto for Rewilding the World

In an Op-Ed published in the Guardian 28th May 2013, Monbiot published his manifesto for rewilding the world In conclusion, the manifesto proposes:

"Above all, rewilding offers a positive environmentalism. Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for. It introduces hope where hope seemed absent. It offers us a chance to replace our silent spring with a raucous summer."

Feral - Book Reception

Press Reviews

Lesley McDowell in the Independent on Sunday:

“Whether you agree with Monbiot’s position on the environment or not, you can hardly fail to be impressed – and moved – by the wonderfully specific way he writes of his own personal experiences of it. His is a world of orange nematocysts, jellyfish “like burst figs”, gannets, river mouths, creeks, mudflats, ochre and viridian lands. One of the things you really notice about the “new wave” of nature writing, evinced also by writers like Robert Macfarlane, is how the words sound. This is prose style as auditory experience; what majesty the eye notes in the landscape is echoed in the vocabulary.

Philip Hoare in The Sunday Telegraph:

*****

“The book justifies its subtitle with rhapsodic descriptions of forays into the natural world. Whether kayaking off the British coast or walking the Kenyan bush, Monbiot – who studied zoology at Oxford – focuses our minds on what we have lost, and what we stand to gain. … as a passionate polemic, it could not be more rigorously researched, more elegantly delivered, or more timely. We need such big thinking for our own sakes and those of our children. Bring on the wolves and whales, I say, and, in the words of Maurice Sendak, let the wild rumpus start.”

Sam Leith in the Spectator:

“He’s a proper reporting journalist, he can write, and he stands for something — which puts him, these days, well ahead of most of our tribe. Plus, this peculiar and involving book — three-quarters exhilarating environmental manifesto, one quarter midlife crisis — has an enormous amount to recommend it … extraordinarily good and crunchy material … There’s a lot here to digest and think about, much to be excited by”.

Jane Shilling in the New Statesman:

“Monbiot has the visionary polemicist’s gift of pursuing an argument by gentle stages to a dazzlingly aspirational conclusion. His accounts of the ecological horrors perpetrated by sheep and the perverse defence of their depredations by assorted conservation bodies are not just persuasive but powerfully affecting. He is brilliant, too, at presenting statistics in readable form, and on the adroitly irrefutable deployment of ancient historical evidence. … something about the charm and persistence of Monbiot’s argument has the hypnotic effect of a stoat beguiling a hapless rabbit. Soon you find yourself dazedly agreeing that it’s all a tremendous idea: yes to the elephants, the beavers and the lynx.”

Simon Barnes in The Times:

“The most important part of the book refreshes your view of the world and fills you with fury that people should have got away with such nonsense and for so long, against the wishes and the best interests of the wider population. The book is full of good things and good ideas … He can turn a paragraph as well as he can paddle a canoe, and he can savour a phrase as he savoured that beetle grub … as a shaker-up of accepted ideas – those of conservationists and those of people resistant to conservation – he has an important role to play and he plays it with élan.”

Michael Viney in the Irish Times:

“To read this seminal, subversive, sometimes intoxicating book could mean never to look at our landscape in quite the same way again. … This trenchant and radical environmental commentator, writing highly regarded columns in the Guardian, looks back on a young life of uncommon adventure … ”

Ian Critchley in the Sunday Times:

“In this remarkable book, the journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot explores projects where this “incendiary idea” has been put into practice. The results are extraordinary: in the space of a few decades, one area of Slovenia, for instance, has transformed from scrubland to dense forest, supporting species that had not been seen there for centuries. … Most impressive about Feral is its focus on finding constructive solutions to ecological problems.”

Christine Griffiths, Science magazine, 21 November 2014, Vol 346, (article #925):

“Throughout the book, Monbiot’s lyrical and provocative tales of his efforts to reengage with the wild stimulate the senses and arouse an innate urge to affiliate with nature. … In Feral, Monbiot takes you on an emotional roller coaster, at times plunging you into troughs of despair as he discusses the bleak plight of much of our wildlife and, at others, raising you up on peaks of hope as he discusses how much of the degradation can be reversed.

Connie St Louis, The Biologist: “With a powerful and riveting narrative, he blends tales of science, deepening our understanding of how natural systems work. Feral is a brave, hopeful and revelatory journey.”

Biography and Autobiography

See George Monbiot’s Wikipedia page for a author’s biography. As published on his own website, the author describes his journey from Oxford student in Zoology to investigative journalist.

Feral - Charity

One of the outcomes of Feral was the charity Rewilding Britain, that George Monbiot helped to found.

References

This article "Feral - Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Feral - Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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