Rewilding the Land Can Repair Damage We've Caused and Reconnect Us to the Natural World

From his home in Oxford, England, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, author of Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, talks about why he refuses to fly, how the reintroduction of beavers in Scotland is transforming the environment, and why he hates sheep.

In this book you present an idea that's new to many of us—rewilding. Can you explain what that means and why it's important for our children and future generations?

"Rewilding" was coined about 20 or 30 years ago, but it first entered the dictionary in 2011. National Geographic is about to air a series called Live Free or Die, about a group of people living out in the woods who call themselves rewilders. Rewilding is one of those words a lot of people seemed to be waiting for. It certainly had that impact on me, because I was becoming increasingly frustrated by living in this very ordered and regulated country. Even conservation areas, which are meant to be set aside for nature, are intensively managed.

I was struggling to identify what was wrong and what I was looking for, and then I came across the word "rewilding," and it exploded in my mind. I've plucked two out of the dozen or so definitions I've come across so far. One is the mass restoration of ecosystems, which means bringing back missing species. The other is the rewilding of our own lives—becoming enchanted once more with the natural world and letting go, for at least some parts of our lives, of that very ordered and controlled life we ordinarily lead.

It appears that our ancestors were wrecking habitat 15,000 years ago and not thinking about us.

There now appears to be evidence that even two million years ago hominins in Africa had devastating impacts on the megafauna there, greatly reducing the populations of large carnivores and large herbivores. We seem to have an innate capacity to cause tremendous damage to the natural world.

Fundamentally, we've escaped from the constraints of natural selection. I think that's more or less the problem. There's nothing capable of controlling our numbers or controlling our impact in the way there always has been with less intelligent species. So we're able to expand without constraint. And we've ended up causing, quite unwittingly, devastating impacts wherever we've gone, because there's nothing to stop us—except of course our own awareness and consciousness, which is something we're struggling to develop.

Are you pessimistic about humanity's future?

That's a question I find very hard to answer. The trend on the whole has been a very bad one. The assault on the natural world has in no way lessened. In fact in some respects it has intensified.

But there are ways in which things have improved, above all our enhanced understanding of psychology and significant improvements in the way we bring up our children in many parts of the world. If children are properly nurtured and brought up in a supportive environment, they're much more open to engagement with what's around them—and more likely to live in a way which isn't damaging others.

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