Rewilding

In Lunenburg, I picked up George Monbiot’s book Feral. It has taken me several weeks to read this well-researched work. There are excellent chapters on his travels in the Amazon, South Africa and Indonesia. His adventures off the Welsh coast in a sea kayak. At the time of writing, Monbiot was living in Central Wales. A major concern was the impact of sheep farming on landscape ecology.

‘The National Ecosystem Assessment states that agricultural land occupied some 1.64 m hectares or 79% of Wales in 2008 and that crops now account for only 3% of the agricultural land area’ p.159.

‘According to Kevin Cahill, the author of Who Owns Britain, 69% of the land here is owned by 0.6% of the population’ p.181.

Monbiot includes chapters on Rewilding the Sea, and the potential for Marine Protected Areas.

From a Nova Scotia perspective, it is interesting to speculate on the potential for Rewilding of the land and sea in Southwest Nova Scotia. Would this change our treatment of the landscape?

Feral was written in 2013. To obtain an update, I went online. Monbiot has written two new books. In 2017, How did we get in this mess? And 2018, Out of the Wreckage.

On the web site fivebooks.com he makes some suggested reading, plus: Jeremy Lent The Patterning Instinct and Martin Adams, Land: a new paradigm for a thriving world.

Postscript

Today, at Endless Shores Books in Bridgetown, I found Joan Francuz, Press Enter to Continue. From the back cover, ‘Like Cicero, she believes that if you have a garden and a library, you have everything that you need’.

I look forward to the day when I can check out some of these books through the services of inter-library loan. Meanwhile, the garden is enjoying the latest rain showers.

References

George Monbiot, 2013. Feral: rewilding the land, the sea and human life. University of Chicago Press.
From fivebooks.com Monbiot recommends:
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Thomas Piketty, Capital
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
Paul Verhaeghe, What about me?
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics

Joan Francuz, 2018. Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon. 1920 House Press.