Reflections on the launch of George Monbiot’s new book Feral.

In my recent post, Dealing with Madness, where I referred to the launch of this new book there were comments from Jules that included him saying:

George is appearing at the Hay Festival to sell his book and do a talk this Saturday and it is only a few miles away so may be I will pop in and buy the book.

all the best

Jules

Jules, who has his own blog Bollocks2012, did go across to the Hay Festival and most generously agreed to write up his visit as a guest post.

So I am delighted to offer you Jules’ report today.

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George at Hay

by Jules Bywater-Lees, 1st June, 2013

The small Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye in Powys is just a few miles from where I live. It went from a little backwater with a failing rural economy to become, in the words of Bill Clinton, ‘the Woodstock of the mind’.  All through the vision of eccentrics!

The town of Hay-on-Wye is pretty.  It is set in the most beautiful Welsh countryside and even has its own tumble-down castle.  However, back in the 70’s, like so many other small market centres, the town was in decline.  That was until an eccentric bibliophile moved into the castle. The name of that eccentric was Richard Booth.

Richard Booth established a second-hand bookshop in town and, as a publicity stunt, on 1st April 1977 proclaimed himself King of Hay and Head of this new Independent Kingdom!  Hay-on-Wye subsequently became a magnet for the second-hand book lover and trader, and now every other shop is a bookshop giving the town a healthy economy serving the many visitors.

The Hay Literary Festival was devised by Norman and Peter Florence in 1988 and had become sufficiently established internationally for the highlight of Bill Clinton being a speaking guest in 2001. It is rather a corporate festival now attracting big names but the town has developed fringe events, that are both cheaper and more fun.

The reason this back story is relevant is that Hay-on-Wye has always been a gateway town between the urban English and rural Welsh. It is only a few hours drive from London and the nearest ‘wilderness’ for day trippers and holiday makers. A few miles further west and the uplands, or mountains as we call them (few are higher than 1000 feet), are considered by most people to be wild.

George Monbiot lives another 60 miles away to the West on the coast in what is considered deepest Wales where the hills have a barren beauty and the locals speak Britain’s ancient first language. But it is not all that it seems; the moors and hilltops are not natural they are a product of over-grazing. They are the degraded shells of a natural ecosystem. A shadowland; a ghostly memory of a former landscape.

Back to this year’s Festival. I coughed up the £8 ticket price and went with friends to have a day of culture. Those friends who came to hear George Monbiot speak were sceptical; for them the hills are beautiful and it is the denuded ‘wildness’ and prancing Spring lambs that gives the landscape so much value.

George makes frequent appearances on television and is very much a leading commentator on the environment and climate change, and his Guardian articles, see postscript, cover his views well so I wasn’t expecting any surprises. If anything I felt sceptical! You see while in principle I agreed with Monbiot’s message of rewilding and supportive of his views on the wide range of subjects he covers, the concept of rewilding appeared to be woolly and vague and lacking the practicalities of how this vision would be achieved. I even prepared a question for the session after his presentation.

Britain is a little country and our national parks are not the same as those elsewhere in the world, a better description would be regulated areas of private ownership. There are a few parks in Wales notable Snowdonia, which amounts to 2,200 square Kilometres (850 square miles), Brecon Beacons, 1,300 Km2 (502 SqM) and larger ones in Scotland such as the Cairngorms of 4,500 Km2 (1,737 SqM). But all of these are tiny compared to Yellowstone National Park with its 9,000 km2 (3,475 SqM and about 100 wolves!). Is it possible to have viable populations of wild animals in such a small area?

My concern is that Britain actually does have a wild landscape of both international importance and scale, with mega fauna, diversity and rare ecosystems that put it on par with the rainforest. It is truly huge with a conservative estimate of 50 to 100 thousand Km2 in area (19,305 to 38,610 square miles) but it is hidden: It is the 31,000 Km (19,260 miles) of coastline and the waters that extend from it. Surely we should be concentrating on its protection rather than allowing the hill tops to grow pretty common native woodland that could support a few hundred wolves, Lynx and beavers at best?

George live, as it were, was a lot more engaging than his appearance on telly and his spoken words a lot more passionate than his written words. I was surprised, and interested.  Like all good story tellers he started off with a mystery. Why do British native trees appear to thrive when they are hacked about into hedges, why do blackthorn trees have thorns so tough and sharp they spike industrial leather gloves and why does the yew and holly have roots so extensive they could hold up a tree twice as big? The answer: Elephants!

Much of what he spoke about is found in his last three Guardian articles so I will spare you the detail but what struck me was his passion. Initially the cynic within wondered if George was just another celebrity seeking a cause.  But such thoughts were dispelled as soon as George started to speak. What was communicated resonated strongly with this idealistic former self who was sufficiently passionate about nature enough to have studied zoology and yearned a human desire for wilderness and, indeed, danger but whose life has otherwise been engaged in more civilised necessities.

Such was the passion expressed by Mr. Monbiot that even I could overlook the practicalities and details; they can be sorted out when they need to be. My friends were impressed and even they were able to see that letting the hills go wild or a least a few of them would enhance their appreciation of our countryside.

But I didn’t buy a signed copy of the book! At £20 for the hardback version I thought it best to order one from my local library or at least wait for the paperback edition on Amazon.

Postscript

Those Guardian articles mentioned are:

My manifesto for rewilding the world, Guardian Newspaper, 27th May.

Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail. There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across.

Why Britain’s barren uplands have farming subsidies to blame, Guardian Newspaper, 22nd May

Even before you start reading the devastating State of Nature report, published today, you get an inkling of where the problem lies. It’s illustrated in the opening pages with two dramatic photographs of upland Britain (p6). They are supposed to represent the natural glories we’re losing. In neither of them (with the exception of some distant specks of scrub and leylandii in the second) is there a tree to be seen. The many square miles they cover contain nothing but grass and dead bracken. They could scarcely provide a better illustration of our uncanny ability to miss the big picture.

It’s time we challenged agricultural hegemony, Guardian Newspaper, 6th June

The dam is beginning to crack, faster than I would have believed possible. Britain, one of the world’s most zoophobic nations, is at last considering the return of some of its extinct and charismatic mammal species.

While wolves, lynx, bears, bison, moose, boar and beavers have been spreading across the continent for decades, into countries as developed and populous as ours, and while they have been widely welcomed in those places, here we have responded to this prospect with unjustified horror.

Why the lynx effect would send Scotland wild, Guardian Newspaper, 2nd June

As Edinburgh Zoo’s panda freakshow continues to captivate the witless and the infantile, a real Scottish animal has been allowed to die. Under the noses of Scottish Natural Heritage, which likes to be known as the nation’s leading conservation body, the Scottish wildcat has all but been extinguished from the Highlands. The importance of this news may be deemed worthy of a mere footnote on the schedule of important issues with which Scotland is grappling but it ought to rank much higher. For the wildcat’s demise seems to be part of the neutering and emasculating of our wildest places. That which was previously held to be a quintessential part of what Scotland was originally meant to look like and smell like and sound like is now, it seems, unimportant.

Britain’s paradise has been lost – but there’s still hope for our wildlife, Guardian Newspaper, 24th May

I never imagined being 52. As I grew up catching lizards and newts, rummaging through hedges to find birds’ nests, or prodding flattened hedgehogs with my scuffed Clarks lace-ups, the world was ripe with natural riches. Every scrap of wasteland revealed yet more gems: tadpoles, fox cubs and a confetti of butterflies. And when at the weekends the family Ford Anglia trundled off to the countryside, I strode in shorts into a wildlife nirvana, a utopia, and I explored what I imagined would be a never-ending world of beautiful and exotic creatures.

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Finally, back to me and all I want to add is that the blogsite for more information on the book Feral is here.

So how to close?  Well having given this post the title of a well-known saying, let me close with one perhaps less familiar but, boy oh boy, so relevant.

“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns

are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”

Thomas Carlyle