George Monbiot and Re-Wilding

Dear George Monbiot,

    I am a great admirer of your tweets and Guardian pieces. However, I agree with your suggestion that you still have some thinking to do on those novel and stimulating ideas about “Inter-generational Theft”, “Re-Wilding”, and “Commons”. I see now that you were addressing yourself to an undergraduate audience, and though the vice-principle sitting next to me said she welcomed the ‘mixed’ audience (meaning the greybeards like me), it may have been wrong of me to put my oar in. But that was my enthusiastic response to your provocative remarks. 

    Inter-generational theft: were you just pandering to a presumed younger audience? I find that concerned older people are quite as engaged as the concerned younger ones, and my bet is that the greediness of my generation will be well matched by the greediness of their descendants. Though I agree that we (current citizens of all generations) are polluting the planet that future citizens will inherit. 

    The idea of re-wilding Britain makes me think of Marie Antoinette playing Bo-Peep in the garden at Versailles. I am all for letting ecosystems evolve on their own without human interference. But where? There are too many humans; in England particularly. You asked, “Where are the Elephants that once roamed these English oak-woods?" Where indeed! They are endangered even in Africa where there are 42 humans per km^2; what chance in England where there are a hundred times as many humans per km^2? You mentioned wolves in Oxford. Well, there were of plenty wolves in England at the time of the Norman conquest (human population 2 million), but they were hunted vigorously, and as the population of humans grew English wolves were exterminated; circa 1500 (human population 3 million). There was no longer room for wolves and men. Since then the population of England has grown 20-fold to 55.3 millions. 

    In 1973, when I got married, the 'good causes' around Cambridge were Greenpeace and Population Countdown. Where-ever has the latter gone? No! One does not need to kill people; merely educate and reward them. The fertility rate in Britain fell from 3.5 babies/woman in the early-modern period to under 2.0 in 1930 and is now 1.79. That of Nigeria today is 5.4, but is falling slowly. (Nevertheless, I think in vitro fertilization need not be offered free on the National Health Service.)

    You advocate “commons". In that case we should understand the processes by which the commons of early-modern England were enclosed and privatised, in order to know and neutralize the forces that will oppose you. Public and communal land is still passing inexorably into private hands; even nominally ‘unalienable’ allotments. 

    Your first questioner seemed to be asking if the same forces that got us into this mess could not be used to get us out of it, which concept I applaud in the sense that we have to work with humans as they are — inherently greedy and increasingly desperate to survive. You wittily rebutted by quoting Einstein, that the thinking that produces a problem is not likely to get you out of it. But look at the Carbon Tax success in British Columbia where it has been shown greatly to reduce CO2 emissions, and even to boost GDP [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax].

    I am all for limiting CO2 emissions. I travel by public transport, and heat myself with renewables, wherever possible. I am not so worried in the longer run, as I understand that the Earth has been round this cycle several times before. Atmospheric CO2 levels varied cyclically from 0.02 - 0.04% (v/v) over the last million years, falling during each interglacial. Plants consume CO2 and do so faster when the climate is warm, and the CO2 levels high. But before that, levels were 10 times higher in the Cambrian period, till the laying down of the chalk in the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago. Before that, during the Carboniferous period (350 million years ago), temperatures (and CO2 levels) oscillated up and down a number of times, laying down a sequence of coal measures. I presume things will revert to ‘normal' once we get the human population back down to 1% of its present level. The Lovelockian view.

Yours, Cawstein

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