The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 196

'I caught ten.'
'Just as I said. Unfishable.'
The forests and their wildlife, the mountains, repopulated by ibex
and chamois, the caves with their endemic species of blind salaman-
der, known to locals as the human fish on account of its smooth pink
skin, the rivers with their steady flow and excellent whitewater raft-
ing, the extraordinary beauty of this regenerated land, draw people
from the rest of Slovenia, from all over Europe and beyond. As I
talked to many Slovenians, it became clear that the integrity of the
natural environment was now a source of national pride.
The forests give rise to other industries too. We happened to pass
through Ribnica, on the way to Koˇcevje, on the day of the annual
wood market. We stopped for a few hours and walked among perhaps
a hundred stalls, selling snaths and grass rakes, scratters and presses,
besoms and brooms, trugs and baskets, stools and barrels, cradles and
rocking horses, racks and rolling pins. Men sporting waistcoats, sugar-
loaf hats and enormous moustaches eased their way through the
crowds, playing their accordions. The market square had been set with
tables, and we joined a municipal barbecue that fed hundreds. The
woodwares being sold that day, we were told, were a small part of the
output of a thriving cottage industry begun in the Middle Ages, when
the Habsburg emperor granted the region's population unlimited rights
to sell its wares throughout the empire, in the hope of alleviating local
poverty. No one would become a millionaire this way, but it kept peo-
ple and their communities alive.
None of this is to deny a disquieting truth, however. Slovenia is just
one example of a global phenomenon. Most of the rewilding that has
taken place on earth so far has happened as a result of humanitarian
disasters.
Throughout the Americas - North, Meso and South - the first
Europeans to arrive in the sixteenth century reported dense settlement
and large-scale farming. Some of them were simply not believed.
Francisco de Orellana and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, who travelled
the length of the River Amazon in 1542, claimed that they had seen
walled cities in which many thousands of people lived, raised high-
ways and extensive farming along its banks. 7 When later expeditions
visited the river they found no trace of them, just dense forest to the