Raucous Summer - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 11

gathering could sustain. (Even so, Mesolithic men and women severely
reduced the numbers of large animals.) The fantasy entertained by
some of the primitivists I have met, of returning to a hunter-gatherer
economy, would first require the elimination of almost all human
beings.
For the same reason I do not think that extensive rewilding should
take place on productive land. It is better deployed in the places -
especially in the uplands - in which production is so low that farming
continues only as a result of the taxpayer's generosity. As essential ser-
vices all over Europe (and in several other parts of the world) are cut
through want of funds, farm subsidies in their current form surely
cannot last much longer. Without them, it is hard to see how farming
in these places can be sustained: for good or ill, it will gradually with-
draw from the hills.
Some people see rewilding as a human retreat from nature; I see it
as a re-involvement. I would like to see the reintroduction into the
wild not only of wolves, lynx, wolverines, beavers, boar, moose, bison
and - perhaps one day in the distant future - elephants and other spe-
cies, but also of human beings. In other words, I see rewilding as an
enhanced opportunity for people to engage with and delight in the
natural world.
Feral also examines the lives we may no longer lead and the con-
straints - many of them necessary - that prevent us from exercising
some of our neglected faculties. It explains how I have sought, within
these constraints, to rewild my own life, to escape from ecological
boredom. I am surely not alone in possessing an unmet need for a
wilder life, and I suggest that this need might have caused a remark-
able collective delusion, from which many thousands of people now
suffer, that seems to be an almost perfect encapsulation of the desire
for a fiercer, less predictable ecosystem.
If you are content with the scope of your life, if it is already as col-
ourful and surprising as you might wish, if feeding the ducks is as
close as you ever want to come to nature, this topic is probably not
for you. But if, like me, you sometimes feel that you are scratching at
the walls of this life, hoping to find a way into a wider space beyond,
then you may discover something here that resonates. I seek to challenge