Will I love Feral?

I am a biologist and I have a passion, a deep love indeed, of the natural world. I always have. It boosts me and nurtures me–body, mind and spirit. But at the moment, with everything that is happening to the world, I think it is easy to lose hope.

Feral is everything you would expect from Monbiot–elegant prose and well thought out ideas building on solid knowledge. But it is more than that. It is a book that brings hope and makes me feel that, even if Monbiot’s vision isn’t the way, there most certainly is a way through the… show more.

A no-punches-pulled look at the way we look at the countryside and compromise its ability to support the nature we love but often harm through placing our own interests first.

It is also, however, a very positive book that offers solutions and challenges the reader to question the way things have always been done in the name of tradition.

This book made me realise that I’d been taking a lot of assumptions for granted and helped me think outside of the box and ask my own questions about how best to nurture and help the wildlife and landscape around me.… show more.

This book made me look at our countryside in a new way, and question our blind acceptance of the status quo. This is a fiercely critical look at our impoverished, tamed, often boring landscape, and argues for bringing back nature. Why can’t we have wolves, lynx, and bears roaming free once again in our countryside? George presents a clear vision for a wilder future.

This is entertaining, a mixture of exasperation at the bizarre behaviour of some conservationists, excitement about the natural world, and environmental hope. Conservation has for too long tried to maintain a ‘just so’ version of the world, confining wildlife to particular places, and managing ecosystems to generate just the ‘right’ set of species living in a particular place. George Monbiot asks why?

His tale of visiting a nature reserve in the Welsh hills left me crying with laughter, the managed landscape overgrazed by fluffy white balls of wool (sheep), a dull vision, until just outside the reserve he spots a… show more.