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Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life QUOTES

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life QUOTES

1 " 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 universalized. 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. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

2 " But rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. There is no point at which it can be said to have arrived. Rewilding of the kind that interests me does not seek to control the natural world, to re-create a particular ecosystem or landscape, but – having brought back some of the missing species – to allow it to find its own way. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

3 " J. G. Ballard reminded us that ‘the suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

4 " I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

5 " I could not continue just sitting and writing, looking after my daughter and my house, running merely to stay fit, pursuing only what could not be seen, watching the seasons cycling past without ever quite belonging to them. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

6 " I thought of the places I would be leaving, of what they were and what they could become. I pictured trees returning to the bare slopes, fish and whales returning to the bay. I thought of what my children and grandchildren might find here, and of how those who worked the land and sea might prosper if this wild vision were to be realized. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

7 " The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

8 " Rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it. It is to ‘love not man the less, but Nature more’. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

9 " The amplification of our lives by technology grants us a power over the natural world which we can no longer afford to use. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live as if there were no tomorrow. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

10 " Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision in the UK has decreased by almost 90 per cent, while the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

11 " I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core William Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

12 " Evolutionary biologists have identified a rule they call the life/dinner principle. A predator puts less effort into the chase than its prey: if the hunter fails it loses only its dinner, if the hunted fails it loses its life. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

13 " Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well maybe She should have thought of that when She was besetting us with droughts and floods and poisonous snakes. Nature started the fight for survival and now She wants to quit because She's losing? Well I say 'Hard Chesse! "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

14 " The sheep has caused more extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building that has ever taken place here. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

15 " This, as far as I can discover, was the first concrete step taken in Wales towards reintroducing an extinct mammal. Here, at Blaeneinion, at the source of the stream which runs through the stunning Cwm Einion into the Dyfi estuary, a group of volunteers had enclosed three acres of land around an old carp pond. People had been talking about returning the beaver to Wales for years. Now, at last, something was happening. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

16 " The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact creates the conditions which allow other species to live there. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

17 " And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion! D. H. Lawrence
Mountain Lion "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

18 " What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Inversnaid "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

19 " Evidence supporting James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system – appears, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

20 " In 2004 the British government’s official advisers, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, proposed that 30 per cent of the United Kingdom’s waters should become reserves in which no fishing or any other kind of extraction happened.58 In 2009 an environmental coalition launched a petition for the same measure – strict protection for 30 per cent of UK seas – which gathered 500,000 signatures.59 Yet, while some nations, including several that are much poorer than the United Kingdom, have started shutting fishing boats out of large parts of their seas, at the time of writing we have managed to protect a spectacular 0.01 per cent of our territorial waters: five of our 48,000 square kilometres. This takes the form of three pocket handkerchiefs: around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Lamlash Bay on the Isle of Arran and Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. There are plenty of other nominally protected areas but they are no better defended from industrial fishing than our national parks are defended from farming. "

― George Monbiot , Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life