Wild Free and Happy Sample 21

[Note: This is the twenty-first sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 201 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Perfection of Hunting

Human pioneers continued their colonization of new regions.  Along the way, they kept learning new hunting strategies, and inventing more and better tools.  They became masters at killing big critters, and bringing home lots of meat.  But the more skillful they got, the greater the risk of unintentional overhunting.  Not only did many large herbivores gradually go extinct, but so did many of the carnivore predators that specialized in hunting them. 

For example, several large cat species had long upper canine teeth or fangs.  These cats were specialized for killing huge herbivores with very thick hides — including elephant-like species.  Big, strong, saber-tooth and scimitar-tooth cats evolved in Africa several million years ago, and eventually expanded across Eurasia and the Americas — and so did elephant-like species.  As hominin hunters gained skill, elephant-like species declined, as did the cats that killed them.  Baz Edmeades suspected that as the number of jumbo critters with thick hides declined, the cats’ long fangs may have become a handicap for hunting other types of prey. 

Evolution provided large herbivores with different self-defense strategies.  One was jumbo size and thick hides.  Another was the ability to flee at high speed.  As evolution gradually made the prey a bit faster, it also sped up the carnivores a bit, too.  Ecosystem health required that the two teams stay relative balance.  If carnivores got too fast, they would deplete their prey and starve.  If herbivores got too good at escape, they would overgraze the land and starve.  In some regions today, speedy lions, leopards, and cheetahs have managed to survive, along with a variety of fast moving herbivores.

When the sacred dance of eater and eaten drifted out of balance, trouble ensued.  Aldo Leopold wrote a famous parable that delivered a powerful ecological lesson.  The sun feeds the grass, the grass feeds the deer, the deer feeds the wolf, the wolf feeds the soil, and the soil feeds the grass.  In the family of life, we all feed each other.  The U.S. government’s predator eradication program has nearly driven wolves to extinction, much to the delight of livestock ranchers.  Leopold explained that when wolves are scarce, deer numbers soar, vegetation gets stripped off the mountain, the soil washes away, and rivers carry the future off to the sea.  The deer lived in fear of wolves, and the mountain lived in fear of deer.

Over the course of four million years, hominin hunters slowly gained some advantages via genetic evolution.  But it was cultural evolution that enabled them to begin a long journey down a powerful and dangerous path.  More and better tools and strategies amplified their ability to hunt and eat a wider variety of animals.  Their growing toolbox included gizmos specialized for killing animals of every size and shape — megafauna, small game, birds, fish, and so on.  

Saber-tooth cats were doomed by hyper specialization.  Human survival is not highly dependent on a narrow variety of food sources.  We are omnivores.  We can digest deer, rodents, eels, shellfish, locusts, worms, maggots, grass seeds, nuts, berries, roots, and so on.  Dietary flexibility, tool making, and cooking technology are important reasons why humans haven’t joined the saber-tooth cats in megafauna Valhalla.

Of course, in the good old days, the preferred prey was megafauna.  For the time and energy invested, they provided generous servings of high quality nutrients — far more than bunnies or maggots.  Of course, large game was not an infinite resource for skilled hunters.  Populations of some megafauna gradually declined, and eventually went extinct.  Plan B for human survival was to adapt to changing conditions, not be a fussy eater, and dine on whatever delicacies were handy.

In the good old days, there were no hunting licenses, regulations, or game wardens.  Hunters were free to do things that are restricted today.  In different regions, herds were sometimes driven into traps, where the killing was indiscriminate, and excess meat was left behind to be recycled by wolves, ravens, microbes, and other scavengers.  Nothing was wasted, but more animals were killed than the hunters needed.  This could weaken the herd.

In Europe, several sites indicate that hunters had focused on nursery herds, consisting of mothers and their offspring.  It was much less dangerous to kill a young mammoth than to attack its huge and powerful daddy, who could easily splatter you into a puddle of bloody mush. 

Edmeades noted that scimitar-tooth cats also preferred to dine on youngsters.  In the Friesenhahn Cave in Bexar County, Texas, excavations revealed the remains of 33 cats, and 300 to 400 young mammoths, mostly two year olds.  He added that the human youngsters in ice age Europe were similarly vulnerable.  Their homeland did not sound like traffic and sirens, it sounded like moaning lions and whooping hyenas.  Wandering away from the camp at night was dangerous and dumb.  Babies instinctively cry when left alone too long.  Even our chimp and baboon cousins have been known to snatch and devour helpless infants.

Evolution continuously learns new tricks via ongoing trial and error.  This is why every species produces surplus offspring, because they are insurance policies.  If each mating pair only had two offspring, they would be in the fast lane to extinction.  Bunnies produce many surplus offspring, and megafauna produce some extras.  This worked brilliantly for millions of years — until tropical primates acquired deadly superpowers via cultural evolution.  These dangerously clever critters developed new and unusual abilities far faster than the genes of other critters could evolve new adaptations to counteract them.  Oh-oh!

Fernando Fernandez noted that, on every continent that humans colonized, the process of driving species extinct often took at least several thousand years.  Abundant populations of megafauna could tolerate centuries of folks who sometimes hunted a bit too hard.  Over the passage of many generations, it would have been normal for the hunters to remain unaware of the gradual long-term decline in game — until the arrival of hunger times, when they slammed hard into the stone wall of resource limits.

In the good old days of abundant megafauna and simple weaponry, some bands of hunters reportedly had no sense of limits at all.  Dan Flores wrote that the Cree tribe believed that buffalo numbers were essentially infinite, and that the animals they killed in no way diminished their abundance.  Shepard Krech wrote that the Powhatan tribe hunted throughout the year, and killed animals regardless of their age, sex, or breeding state.  The Cherokee believed that every deer they killed was reanimated, each would be replaced.  Eventually, unpleasant experiences of scarcity revealed the existence of limits, which inspired a shift toward a more conservation-oriented approach.

Farley Mowat told stories about the Ihalmiut people who lived in the region around Hudson Bay in northern Canada.  When traders moved in, the natives learned that they could trade fox furs for cool stuff like guns and ammunition.  These made it far easier to kill deer, so their traditional mode of low tech hunting was abandoned.  Prior to firearms, it had never occurred to anyone that it was possible to kill too many deer.  Until then, the availability of deer was as reliable as the dance of the sun and moon.

Two factors were in play here.  (1) When each generation of hunters experienced adequate game, the sense of abundance could mask their gradual decline for centuries.  (2) Times of abundance could also absorb some growth among the hunting clans.  Dan Flores noted that the average size of coyote litters is 5.7 pups, but when food is abundant, or their numbers are dwindling, they have larger litters.  As I write today, the thundering herd of 7.7 billion humans demonstrates that, like coyotes, our numbers also grow when food resources increase.

Ronald Wallace noted that in times of abundance, intensification of hunting was normal.  When caribou herds were migrating, folks killed as many as they could, because winters were long, dark, and cold.  They could enjoy a stable (but temporary) way of life, for as long as intensification didn’t eliminate abundance.  Of course, the shadow of intensification was population growth, which had a tendency to hasten the end of easy living.  Scarcity inspired the nerds to innovate new hunting gizmos, like the leister, fish hook, net, snare, and bow and arrow.  Over time, as megafauna became scarcer, the menu expanded.  Red deer, elk, roe deer, wild pig, fish, shellfish, and waterfowl were eaten at the Maglemose site in Denmark 10,000 years ago.

Another star in this snow country soap opera was climate change.  When warmer eras moved in, ice sheets melted and retreated.  Ice was replaced by tundra, then steppe, then forest.  Much of Europe was covered with dense forest by 9,500 years ago.  Megafauna that live in herds thrive on steppe grasslands.  Forests were home to lower numbers of more solitary large game — elk, aurochs, deer, wild pigs.  Expanding forests encouraged some folks to migrate to coastlines, lake shores, wetlands, rivers, and streams.  Locations with abundant marine food resources sometimes developed into sedentary communities — like coastal tribes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

Some cultures understood the notion of limits, and the risks of living too hard.  Some made efforts to live more conservatively, with greater emphasis on foresight and self-restraint.  Some developed traditions and taboos intended to reduce the risks of overhunting and overbreeding. 

Other cultures became less cautious, and pursued riskier paths.  Today, it’s clear that the risk-takers have overwhelmed the cautious, careful, and conservative.  Cultures that mindfully limit their numbers often become road kill for cultures that don’t.  Sadly, the world outside your window is a monster child of the risk fiends, for whom Growth is the god word — growth by any means necessary.

Anyway, Ronald Wright wrote that maybe 12,000 years ago, hunters in some regions had become too clever, too successful, and too numerous.  It was becoming apparent that their traditional lifestyle was approaching its expiration date.  Cave painters put down their brushes and became rabbit hunters.  Wild megafauna was not an infinite resource. 

Wright called this transition “the perfection of hunting,” and he declared it to be humankind’s first progress trap.  Progress traps are the unintended consequences of brilliant innovations that permit clever folks to survive by shifting to a new and improved way of life.  Unfortunately, they also tend to burn the bridges behind them as they advance.   Returning to the good old days is no longer possible. 

For example, our transition to fossil energy has fueled explosive population growth, which makes a quick and easy return to a muscle-powered way of life impossible.  It’s like we’re helpless passengers on the Titanic.  Despite our legendary big brains, our capacity for foresight is often abominable.  Over and over we fail to anticipate what the unintended consequences of our ingenious inventions might be — agriculture, automobiles, nuclear weapons, etc.  The list is endless.

Wright concluded that the perfection of hunting put the forks to an ancient tradition, forcing humans to explore dangerous paths, like herding and farming.  Hunter-gatherer cultures mostly blinked out over time.  A few have managed to survive into modern times.  He expected that the fossil record left behind by the Anthropocene will resemble the effects of an asteroid strike.

Mark Nathan Cohen lamented the shift to plant and animal domestication.  Hominins had been hunters for four million years.  He wrote that hunting “has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved.”  Around 10,000 years ago, almost everyone lived on wild foods.  By 2,000 years ago, most of humankind depended on food produced on farms. 

The early days of hunting megafauna was a luxurious life.  Gradually increasing population pressure was what drove the downward spiral to surviving on domesticated crops.  These foods were less nutritious and far more labor intensive to produce.  The engines of this decline were cultural evolution and technological innovation.  These forces were highly contagious, and spread around the world. 

Wright noted that in 1492, the culture of the Old World washed up on the shores of the New World.  The two cultures had been separated for 15,000 years or more.  The similarities between the two are striking.  Both had roads, cities, palaces, schools, kings, priests, temples, armies, peasants, merchants, sports, theater, art, books, music, and so on.

Diana Muir wrote a fascinating sketch about the early human experience in New England.  After the glaciers retreated, the land became home to animals including horses, musk oxen, wolves, saber-tooth cats, bison, giant bears, giant beavers, and four species of mammoths.  By 10,000 years ago, a number of the megafauna species had gone extinct.  The menu then featured deer, bear, beaver, moose, waterfowl, turkeys, heath hens, salmon, shad, alewives, shellfish, berries, acorns, and so on.  This was a land of abundance, and the human population grew and grew.

Oysters and clams had once been famine food.  By 2,000 years ago, they became a dietary staple.  Digging them up was tedious backbreaking work, and a grown man needed to eat 100 every day.  Many thousands more were smoked and dried for winter dining.  Empty shells were dumped in huge piles.  At the lowest, oldest layers, the oyster shells were 10 to 20 inches wide (25 to 50 cm), indicating 40 year old animals.  In newer layers, the shells were much smaller.

By 800 years ago, agriculture was producing half of their food.  Staples included corn, beans, and squash.  Their slash and burn farming required tedious backbreaking work.  It also depleted the fertility of the thin, rocky soils.  The good old days had passed.

Sea of Slaughter



Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was a famous Canadian nature writer, a fire-breathing critic of modernity’s war on wildness.  He spent much of his life close to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and was an avid outdoorsman.  By 1975, he and his wife were becoming acutely aware of the sharp decline of wildlife during their own lifetimes.

Mowat chatted with 90-year olds who confirmed his suspicions, and revealed even more tragedies.  Then he began researching historical documents, and his mind snapped.  Early European visitors were astonished by the abundance of wildlife in North America, something long gone in the Old World.  To them, the animals appeared to be infinite in number, impossible for humans to diminish, ever!

At this point, spirits of the ancestors gave him the heart-wrenching task of writing the mother of all horror stories.  His book, Sea of Slaughter, focused on the last 500 years in a coastal region spanning from Labrador to Cape Cod.  The book has five parts: birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and fin feet (seals, walrus).

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted for subsistence, taking only what they needed to survive.  Europeans were strikingly different.  They suffered from brain worms that inflamed a maniacal obsession with wealth and status.  They were bewitched by an insatiable greed that was impossible to satisfy — they could never have enough.  Today, scientists refer to this devastating, highly contagious mental illness as get-rich-quick fever — the villain of this story.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by the Isle of Birds, a rookery for auks (northern penguins).  He wrote, “This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been removed.”  Auks were large, flightless, fat, and laid eggs in accessible locations (not cliff side nests).  Vast numbers were clobbered, salted, and loaded on ships.  Others were chopped into fish bait.  Many were boiled in large cauldrons to extract the oil from their body fat.  In Europe, it had taken over a thousand years to exterminate the auks; in the New World, advanced technology got the job done in just 300 years.  The last two died in 1844.

Prior to the emergence of the petroleum industry in the late nineteenth century, civilization acquired large amounts of oil from wildlife — seabirds, whales, walrus, seals, porpoises, and fish.  An adult polar bear killed in autumn provided lots of meat, a valuable pelt, and twelve gallons (45 l) of good oil.  Animal oil was used for lamp fuel, lubrication, cooking oil, soap, cosmetics, margarine, and leather processing.

There are a number of repeating patterns in the book.  The hunger for money was the heart of the monster.  Nothing else really mattered.  If there were just ten whales left in the world, and they were worth money, the hunters would not hesitate to kill them all.  God made animals for us to obliterate.  Whenever possible, wildlife massacres were done on an industrial scale — kill as many as possible, as fast as possible.

Conservation was an obscene, profit killing, four-letter word.  When there were fewer cod, whales, or seals, the value of each corpse increased.  So, the industry got more and bigger boats, used the latest technology, and raced to kill as many as possible, before competitors found them.  Rules, regulations, and prohibitions were always issued far too late to matter, and they usually included enough loopholes to make them meaningless.  The slaughter industry ignored them, and bureaucrats winked and looked the other way.

Five hundred years ago, cod grew to seven feet long (2.1 m), and weighed up to 200 pounds (91 kg).  An observer noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.”  Today the average cod is 6 pounds.  For many years, they were killed in staggering numbers.  By 1968, the cod fishery was rubbished.  It has not recovered, because fish mining has also depleted small fish, the cod’s basic food.

Nobody ever confesses to overfishing or overhunting.  What happened to the cod?  Obviously, they moved somewhere else, we don’t know where.  Efforts are made to find them.  When searches failed, it was time to seek and destroy scapegoats: whales, porpoises, loons, otters, cormorants, and many others.

In 1850, loons lived in nearly every lake and large pond in the northeast, from Virginia to the high arctic.  Hunters rarely ate them, but they were excellent flying targets for gun geeks.  When folks noticed salmon and trout numbers declining, it was time to look for loon nests and smash their eggs.  Cormorants got the same treatment.  Their rookeries were invaded, and all eggs and chicks destroyed.  Sometimes they sprayed the eggs with kerosene, to kill the embryos.  Birds continued sitting on lifeless eggs, instead of laying new eggs.

Big game hunting was a profitable industry, catering to <bleepity-bleeps> who found killing to be thrilling.  It generated the shiny coins that make men crazy.  What could be more fun than cruising around shooting beluga whales?  In the old days, many beaches were jam-packed with walrus that could grow to 14 feet long (4.2 m), and weigh up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg).  Rich lads enjoyed walrus hunting competitions.  One guy, in three weeks, killed 84 bulls, 20 cows, and a number of youngsters, not counting those that died unseen after being wounded.

Mature whales and walrus had no natural predators, so they never evolved defensive aspects or strategies.  They didn’t need to be aggressive or speedy.  They were often curious and friendly.  Hunters preferred to kill black right whales.  Their bodies had a layer of blubber up to 20 inches (51 cm) thick, containing up to 3,500 gallons (12,250 l) of oil.  Abundant blubber meant that the dead ones floated.  Other species sank when killed, and were lost.  With regard to all whale species, it was common for the number of lost carcasses (sinkers) to exceed the number landed and butchered.  Extreme waste didn’t matter as long as the carcasses landed were profitable.

Anyway, Sea of Slaughter is over 400 pages of back-to-back horror stories with no rest stops.  The book is painful, disgusting, and illuminating — a mind-bending experience.  Reading it puts you into an altered state of consciousness, an otherworldly trance state.  Our brains aren’t designed to process flash floods of stupidity.

Many readers will be shocked to see the degree to which screw brained beliefs can turn ordinary people into mindless monsters — an important concept for folks trying to understand the world.  Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the foolish destruction as an aspect of the bad old days, when we didn’t know any better.  Readers having a larger collection of working brain cells will realize that the greed is still with us, in a multitude of new forms, and it’s destroying more than ever before — a vital idea to grasp.

It’s much easier for us to acknowledge horrors that happened in the past, rather than the horrors our shopping is causing today.  History can be powerful medicine when it is taught by competent elders, instead of the usual cheerleaders for wealth, empire, progress, and human supremacy.  Mowat was an excellent wordsmith, and a passionate storyteller.  You will never forget this one.

Postscript.  In 1985, following the publication of Sea of Slaughter, Mowat was scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S.  Shortly after boarding his plane in Toronto, customs officials escorted him back off.  He learned that he was forever forbidden to travel to the land of freedom — and they wouldn’t tell him why.  This was the Reagan era, and Mowat had pissed off many conservatives.  Banishment inspired him to write a smart-assed new book, My Discovery of America.

Mowat, Farley, Sea of Slaughter, 1984, Reprint, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2012.

The Sea of Slaughter documentary, with Farley Mowat (1 hr, 45 min) is HERE.

A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac, is near the top of many lists of environmental classics.  It was published in 1949, and has sold over two million copies.  He was born in Iowa in 1887, when Earth was inhabited by just 1.4 billion humans.  It was an era before radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, computers, DDT, nuclear fission, and antibiotics.  Most roads were dirt.  Vast ancient forests still thrived.  On the first page, Leopold informs us that this is a book for people who cannot live without wild things.

Part one is a series of twelve sketches, one for each month.  They describe how the land changes during the circle of the seasons — the return of the geese, the mating ritual of the woodcocks, the rutting of the deer, the bloody snow where predators snatched prey.  They describe what life was like in simpler times, before the sprawl, the malls, the highways, the tsunami of idiotic consumer crap.  People were more in touch with the life of the land, because it had not yet been deleted.

In 1935, Leopold bought a farm in Wisconsin.  The previous owner had tried and failed to make a living tilling the lean sandy soil.  The place was cheap, far from the highway, worthless to civilization, but a precious sanctuary for a nature-loving professor.  Luckily, the soil mining enterprise perished quickly, before it had time to exterminate the wildness.

Leopold loved the great outdoors.  He loved hiking and hunting.  Birds fascinated him.  He spent many years working for the U.S. Forest Service, and later became a professor of Game Management at the University of Wisconsin.  Sadly, he lived in a culture that was waging full-scale war on nature, and this drove him mad.  It was so senseless.  During his life, the population had grown from 1.5 to 2.4 billion, an era of staggering out of control disruption.

Part two presents observations, made in assorted times and places, about the damaged relationship between Americans and nature.  This relationship was often abusive, because it lacked love.  There often was no relationship at all.  Many folks had no sense of connection to the rest of the family of life.  For them, nature was nothing more than a treasure chest of resources that God created for the amusement of ambitious nutjobs.

Leopold was saddened by the trends.  He learned to never revisit places that had amazed him in his youth.  It was too painful to see the damage that commerce and tourism were tirelessly inflicting.  It was best not to turn sweet memories into heartbreaking nightmares.

He was raised in an era when it was perfectly normal to kill wolves, coyotes, and other predators at every opportunity.  These “vermin” killed too many game animals, depriving hunters of their rightful harvest.  The most famous essay in this book is Thinking Like a Mountain.  Having just shot a wolf, the gunman noticed a fierce green glow in its eyes.  With the wolves eliminated, the deer multiplied in numbers, stripping the vegetation off the mountain, and wrecking the ecosystem.  Deer lived in fear of wolves, and the mountain lived in fear of deer.

Part three is essays describing the need for a land ethic.  Cultures have ethics to define right and wrong.  Traditionally, these defined person-to-person interactions, or the interactions between individuals and society.  Leopold lamented that American culture lacked a land ethic, rules for living with the natural world, the family of life.  In our culture, as long as the land was not claimed and defended by someone else, you were free to do whatever you pleased.

Mainstream education was close to useless, because it was incapable of recognizing the glaring defects in the mainstream worldview.  It loaded young minds with the crash-prone software of infantile self-interest.  Generation after generation was being programmed to spend their lives as robotic servants to our economic system.  The education system and the economic system were the two primary threats to the health of the land.  Today, 65 years later, the lunacy has become a roaring hurricane.  Leopold would be horrified and furious.

Leopold was a pleasant lad, glowing with love for the natural world, and a gifted storyteller.  But this should not be the only ecology book you ever read.  Since 1949, there has been an explosion of research in anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and environmental history.  Many important discoveries have been made about hunter-gatherers, agriculture, deforestation, civilization, finite resources, climate change, and ecological sustainability.  Today’s deep ecologists will sneer at a few statements in the book, but in 1949, no one was more radical than Leopold.

At the time, he knew we were on a bad path, and we needed to pay serious attention to where it was taking us.  He clearly understood what we needed.  He wrote, “Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.”  He was sketching out a concept now known as ecological sustainability.  Here’s his land ethic in a nutshell: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”  Great!

Since the book was published, population has skyrocketed from 2.4 to 7.3 billion.  Our leaders, educators, and the vast human herd remain lost in a dream world where perpetual growth is the only channel on the glowing screens.  This story has paralyzed our culture, and condemned our descendants, but it’s running out of time.  Hopefully, in its aftermath, important lessons will be learned and never forgotten.

Leopold’s book was written “for people who cannot live without wild things.”  As the swelling mobs surge into vast cities, our disconnection from wild nature is almost complete.  We have forgotten who we are, and where we came from.  Well, we’re wild animals, and we came from wild nature, like every other critter.  Darwin revealed this embarrassing secret, but it still makes us uncomfortable, since it clashes with our deepest, darkest myths, our grandiose illusions of superiority.

These anthropocentric myths have ancient roots in every civilized culture, and they are like venomous brain worms that turn us into planet thrashing monsters.  In 1949, few expressed doubts about these myths, but Leopold did.  He was a flaming radical in his day.  He often dreamed that the progressive movement would eventually grow, flourish, and address the primary challenges of our time, but reality hasn’t cooperated.

His vision of a land ethic would have been a first step, but not a miraculous cure.  No other animal needs a formal system of rules and regulations to discourage self-destructive behavior.  Like our chimp and bonobo cousins, the others have never forgotten who they are, or how to live.  Thinking like an animal has worked perfectly for millions of years.  Thinking like a conqueror has been a disastrous failure.

Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989.  [1949]

Feral (Rewilding)

Beneath the pavement in London, archaeologists have found the bones of hippos, elephants, giant deer, giant aurochs, and lions.  The Thames watershed was once a gorgeous, thriving, wild paradise.  In the early Mesolithic, the western seaboard of Europe, from Scotland to Spain, was covered by a magnificent rainforest.  Europe was once a thriving wild paradise.

Evolution created utterly fantastic masterpieces.  The megafauna of the Americas grew to enormous size, in the absence of too-clever two-legged tool addicts.  Ground sloths weighed as much as elephants.  Beavers were the size of bears.  The Argentine roc had a 26-foot wingspan (8 m).  All of them vanished between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, about the time you-know-who arrived, with their state of the art hunting technology.

On a damp gray dawn, the English writer George Monbiot woke up screaming once again.  He suffers from a chronic spiritual disease that he calls ecological boredom.  Living amidst endless crowds of two-legged strangers can become unbearably unpleasant for sensitive people with minds.  Human souls can only thrive in unmolested wildness (the opposite of England).  He leaped out of bed, packed his things, and moved to the coast of Wales, where there was more grass than concrete.  He hoped that this would exorcise his demons.

They weren’t demons.  Obviously, ecological boredom is a healthy and intelligent response to the fierce madness of twenty-first century life, and it’s curable.  What’s needed to break this curse is a holy ceremony called rewilding.  During five years of country living in Wales, Monbiot wrote Feral, to explain his voyage and vision.  It’s a 500-decibel alarm clock.

Humans were wild animals for millions of years.  In the last few thousand years, we’ve declared war on wild ecosystems, in our whacked out crusade to domesticate everything everywhere, and lock Big Mama Nature in a maximum-security zoo.  Rewilding is about throwing this sick, suicidal process into reverse.

It’s about allowing long extinct woodlands to become healthy thriving forests once again.  It’s about reintroducing the wild beings that have been driven off the land — bear, bison, beavers — a sacred homecoming.  It’s about creating marine reserves so aquatic species have places of refuge from the insane gang rape of industrial fishing.  Importantly, it’s about introducing our children to the living planet of their birth.

Wales was a land of lush forests 2,100 years ago.  Today, it’s largely a mix of sheep pasture and other assorted wastelands.  One day, Monbiot climbed to a hilltop in the Cambrian Mountains, where he could see for miles.  He noted a few distant Sitka spruce tree farms, and a bit of scrubby brush, but otherwise, “across that whole, huge view, there were no trees.  The land had been flayed.  The fur had been peeled off, and every contoured muscle and nub of bone was exposed.”

Some folks now call it the Cambrian Desert, whilst shameless tourism hucksters refer to it as one of the largest wilderness areas in the U.K.  To Monbiot, rural Wales is a heartbreaking sheepwreck, reduced to ecological ruins by the white plague — countless dimwitted furry freaks from Mesopotamia that gobble the vegetation down to the roots, and prevent forest recovery.

One day, Monbiot met a brilliant young sheep rancher, Dafydd Morris-Jones, who had no sympathy for rewilding at all.  His family had been raising sheep on this land for ages.  Every rock in the valley had a name, and his uncle remembered all of them.  Allowing the forest to return would amount to cultural genocide, snuffing out the traditional indigenous way of life, and erasing it forever.

I had great sympathy for Dafydd’s view.  In 1843, my great-grandfather, Richard E. Rees, was born in the parish of Llangurig, Wales — deep in the heart of sheep country.  His mother was a handloom weaver.  They lived down the road from the wool mill in Cwmbelan.  My ancestors survived for many generations by preventing the return of the forest, deer, and boars, by preventing an injured land from healing.  Of course, for the last several thousand years, none of my ancestors had been wild people — they suffered from the tremendous misfortune of having been born in captivity.

Every generation perceives the world of their childhood as the normal state, the ideal.  Many don’t comprehend that the ecosystem was badly damaged long before they were born.  What they accept as normal might give their grandparents nightmares.  Monbiot refers to this shortsightedness as Shifting Baseline Syndrome.  The past is erased by mental blinders.  Each generation adapts to an ongoing pattern of decline.  Humans have an amazing tolerance for crowding, filth, and stress.  The result is the wounded wheezing world you see around you.

Monbiot gushes with excitement when describing the amazing changes that followed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park.  They promptly corrected deer overpopulation, which led to forest regeneration, which led to healthier streams, which led to more fish.  When they reduced the coyotes, the result was more rabbits, mice, hawks, weasels, boxes, badgers, eagles, and ravens.  Here is Monbiot enthusiastically discussing this process in a 15 minute TED talk. 

A number of European organizations are promoting rewilding.  Pan Parks has protected 240,000 hectares (593,000 acres), and is working on a million more.  Wild Europe is working to create wildlife corridors across the continent.  Rewilding Europe promotes the reintroduction of missing species (here is a brief video trailer).  Pleistocene Park in Siberia is reintroducing many species in a 160 sq. km. park (62 sq. mi.), which it plans to expand to 600 sq. km. (232 sq. mi.).

In continental Europe, the rewilding movement is building momentum.  Wolves, bears, bison, and beavers have begun the path to recovery.  Not every effort succeeds — Italy reintroduced two male lynx, and the cute couple mysteriously failed to produce offspring.  Britain and Ireland remain out to lunch.  Most of the land is owned by wealthy elites who are obsessed with preserving a “tidy” looking countryside — treeless and profoundly dreary.  They enjoy recreational hunting, and wolves would spoil their fun.

Monbiot delights in goosing every sacred cow along his path, and readers of many varieties are sure to foam at the mouth and mutter naughty obscenities.  For me, Feral had a few zits, but they don’t sink the book.  He leads us to the mountaintop and allows us to view the world from above the haze of assumptions, illusions, and fantasies.  Who are we?  Where is our home?  Where are we going? 

He rubs our noses in the foul messes we’ve made, hoping we’ll learn from our accidents and grow.  He confronts us with big important issues that we’ve avoided for far too long — the yucky stoopid stuff we’re doing for no good reason.  I like that.  This is important.  He recommends intriguing alternatives to stoopid.  It’s about time.

Monbiot, George, Feral — Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, Allen Lane, London, 2013.