Out Come the Wolves

Longhorn Cattle Grazing at Knepp Estate, West Sussex, 2017 (Photo Author's Own)             Rewilding at its core is letting nature ‘get on with it.’ Much conservation & land management involves a huge amount of human meddling and intrusion and tends to maintain a ‘wilderness’ that is merely traditionally and aesthetically accepted. Nature has all of the necessary components in-built, but humans have altered these workings to the point that certain essential species have become extinct or extirpated (total removal of a species from an area) from countries that now have an impoverished wilderness. If we reintroduce some of these species we could spark a chain reaction that enriches wildlands. The most heavily cited success is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1994. (Farquhar) The wolves keep deer numbers in check by hunting the slowest and weakest of the herd, and keep them on t...

Disclaimer: Article written with Bristol residents in mind; doesn't mean these tips don't apply wherever you are though! Food waste accounts for 7 million tonnes   of all waste created in the UK annually . Unlike other forms of waste, food waste has the potential to be easily diverted from landfill,   avoiding continued overfilling of landfills, pollution of the environment, and emissions from the transportation, industry and uncontrolled decomposition of this waste, not to mention the wasted man hours, soil nutrients, water, and additional costs needed to create any and all food. Grow your own vegetables By growing your own vegetables you can be in control of everything that will go into them, and eventually your mouth. Asides from the taste and health benefits, you’ll be more wary of wasting the results of your hard work rather than easily accessible supermarket produce; you won’t have to purchase as much produce as well, and so will sa...

Obviously we do not want to believe that the apocalypse is upon us, but our current era is ticking a lot of boxes. A massive extinction event is underway globally; natural landscapes including rainforest are increasingly torn apart to make way for crop monocultures and anthropocentric land management; the climate is shifting into human-induced instability. For humans there are impending crises of overpopulation, fertile land availability, and water purity. Yet, we are trundling on.             Yes, certain concerns get thrust into the public eye, like the endangerment of charming mammals or marine plastic pollution, but the whole, the entirety, should be much more concerning than it is treated. I feel this is partly because the kind of apocalypse that our literature, art, film and religion prepares us for is dramatic, sudden, definite, universal, and possibly glamorous.      ...

It’s only been two years since I became a vegetarian, and for me it was very easy; although I ate meat, I never saw it as very important, and my upbringing didn’t hinge much cultural importance to it. As I began cooking more I began eating meat less, which was expensive and not always easily storable or usable, and fairly often bland. My partner has been a vegetarian most of her life so it made a lot of sense to just slip into it and stop eating meat in the winter of 2016.             The breaking point for me was a few lines and descriptions in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, which I was studying at the time as part of my Literature undergraduate degree. Through the titular character, Coetzee elaborates that meat producing systems are factories of death, emerging from the Chicago slaughtering pits of the early 20 th century that specialised in toning the efficiency of killing, where men spent their working hours clubbing...