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small fallow corners and unexploited pockets of even the most fertile
places.
The drive towards monoculture causes a dewilding, of both places
and people. It strips the Earth of the diversity of life and natural struc-
ture to which human beings are drawn. It creates a dull world, a flat
world, a world lacking in colour and variety, which enhances eco-
logical boredom, narrows the scope of our lives, limits the range of our
engagement with nature, pushes us towards a monoculture of the
spirit.
I doubt that anyone wants this to happen to the land that sur-
rounds them, except those - a small number - who make their money
this way. But these few have been empowered both by their owner-
ship of the land and by a kind of cultural cringe, which prevents other
people from challenging them. The Italian philosopher Antonio
Gramsci used the term 'cultural hegemony' to describe the way in
which ideas and concepts which benefit a dominant class are univer-
salized. They become norms, adopted whole and unexamined, which
shape our thinking. Perhaps we suffer from agricultural hegemony:
what is deemed to be good for farmers or landowners is deemed,
without question or challenge, to be good for everyone.
In some cases we pay to support this hegemony and the monocul-
tures it creates. Scores of billions of pounds of public money are spent
each year to sustain the degradation of the natural world. In the
United States, farm subsidies encourage the unvaried planting, across
vast acreages, of corn. In Canada, subsidies for pulp and paper mills
help to replace ancient forests with uniform plantations. Worse, per-
haps, from the point of view of rewilding, is public spending which
sustains monocultures in places which would otherwise be reclaimed
by nature. This is what happens in the nation I am using as a case
study of the monomania which blights many parts of the world. Here
another monoculture has developed: a luxuriance, an infestation, a
plague . . . of sheep.
I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my
waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should
clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which can-
not be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology
and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason - closely fol-
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