I am very much enjoying George Monbiot self-puffing in the Guardian for his new book Feral… Who knows, if I have the means I may even buy the book. The latest piece has two points of interest.
The first is megafauna. It’s astonishing to think that the Americas once had mammoths and giant bison with seven foot horns, sabre tooth salmon and a bird with a 26 foot wingspan. This is exciting stuff. The world was once very different and presumably will be in the future. It’s a step away from Another World is Possible.
There are slight dangers in measuring the quality of nature by the quality and variety of megafauna. Humanity is the planet’s dominant species if you consider that it now quite possibly harnesses more energy than all natural processes put together. That said, by most other measures, biomass, variety of species, variety of habitats colonised etc, bacteria are winning the race for life, they dominant domain of life on Earth.
Monbiot’s point about “rewilding” wildlife reserves and other expanses of nature is apt. Wildlife reserves are often not teaming with life. They are places that are kept as they have been discovered (or perhaps we should say acknowledged), which is frequently in a depleted state. If rewilding is to be practical and progressive it should be taken into the city. The challenge is to reintegrate civilisation and everyday life into the rhythms of nature, have it accord rather than clash with the flows of energy (the water cycle, the carbon cycle etc), and do all this without attacking people’s standards of living.