George Monbiot in the pulpit – rewilding is a source of hope and a challenge to the 1%

Joking that he felt like an old-time hell-fire preacher speaking from the pulpit of Hope Baptist Church, George Monbiot instead brought a vision of hope to the packed audience yesterday at Hebden Bridge Arts Festival.

Launching a national rewilding group – [ now launched, one year on] – he extolled the delights of an environment where biodiverse plants, insects and animals flourish thanks to the reintroduction of keystone species at the top of the food chain – such as beavers, pine martins and wolves.

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Who speaks for the environment? Two Guardian writers slug it out

In the Guardian, George Monbiot and Steven Poole have recently put forward contesting views of environmental writing.

Monbiot’s riposte to Poole’s critical review of a Romantic strand of contemporary nature writing is pinging round t’internet. Affronted by Poole’s criticisms of his book Feral,  Monbiot asserts that Poole is some kind of Tory/Mao Tse Tung/Red Guard hybrid, a humanities graduate dupe of postmodernism and, above all, a philistine.
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Feral – another midlife crisis story, or a way forward for conservation politics?

George Monbiot’s Feral: Searching for enchantment on the frontiers of rewilding is worth dipping into – unless you are one of those bourgeois escapists whom Steven Poole’s recent Guardian Review article identified as the likely readership for this genre of nature writing. In which case, you’ll probably want to read it from cover to cover.
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Feral: the pathetic fallacy, but not as we know it

Midway along his life’s path, George Monbiot found himself on a dreary moor with no track to show him the way.

Lacking a poet ghost to guide him on the necessary descent into the circles of hell, through purgatory and on to paradise, Monbiot’s new book Feral conjures an Edenic fantasy of re-forested uplands, prowled by wolves, beavers and other top predators. In his dreams, he has banished the pesky sheep and hill farmers who between them have degraded this once and future biodiverse ecosystem.
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