Out Come the Wolves

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.      ...

Picture taken from the Wildlife Trust Myself and other environmental-leftist thinkers will have been cornered into a strange position in the previous few months; agreeing with a proposal that infamous tory politician Michael Gove has put backing behind. Indeed, as environmental secretary, he has been saying many of the ‘right things’ when it comes to environment, sustainability & their future in Britain. Gove has recently given his backing to the proposal for the reintroduction of  beavers to the Forest of Dean where they have been absent for four hundred years.             Elsewhere in the West country, the Devon Wildlife trust has been conducting a heavily monitored trial release of beavers in the River Otter since 2015. These are just a few of the voices clamouring for beaver reintroduction to the united kingdom, amidst calls for other reintroductions, many of them much less timid creatures as the beaver...

These are some texts that I read while studying Environment, Development & Policy at the university of Sussex that I feel helped formulate my own ideas on rewilding as a conservation strategy. There are definitely more out there that are explicitly about rewilding, but I feel these helped me form my own personal opinion. To follow up, the works of Franz Vera, Sergey Zimov, David Foreman, Josh Donlan et al. and Mauro Galetti have helped form some of the earlier writings on rewilding. Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding - George Monbiot The first text on rewilding I read. I was turned on to Feral by a piece written by Monbiot in the Guardian, which I think was an adapted excerpt in the run-up to the books launch. Monbiot has written fairly extensively on environment and society, with a previous book, HEAT, focussing on climate change. This book offers an extensive and emotive look at rewilding in a holistic British landscape, selecting areas o...

One of the things many conservationists, especially those involved in rewilding, in Scotland (or Britain in general) seem to turn to is the links between ancient British history and language and the wilderness that has since been drastically extirpated from the Isles. A consideration for the Celtic history of Britain can be found in texts such as George Monbiot's writings including his book Feral, which brought rewilding into British popular consciousness, and other texts that often highlight the plight of the Scottish or Welsh when faced with clearance and industrialised agricultural change. Organsiations similarly discuss the Celtic nature to Britain's wilderness, whether they are management trusts such as the Woodland trust, or rewilding organisations such as the Cambrian Wildwood project in Wales, or Trees for Life operating in Scotland. Many organisations have settled on exploring a particular era of linguistic history in the British Isles, namely the Brythonic (asides...

All pictures are taken from the Sussex Roots facebook group (link at bottom) and so may not be my own. Sussex Roots is a society at the University of Sussex; we have always attempted to act as a co-operative as much as Student Union society limits will let us. Basically, it is an allotment for all to get involved in, learn about DIY gardening for the purpose of food, learn about interacting with the environment, experiment with sustainability and socialise outside of an academic space. The original allotment site- we grew almost everything in raised beds outside. I first heard of Roots from a group of my neighbours from East Slope, the now condemned student halls at Sussex, that were about to head out to the site. It suddenly dawned on me that this would be the first time I could make decisions and be more active in growing food. Before, when working on family member's plots, I was merely clueless labour; now, I was part of a team, all of us clueless, welcoming to more c...

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21 st  century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.             Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue wit...