Fionnáin reviewed Feral by George Monbiot
Review of 'Feral' on 'GoodReads'
1 star
I have to admit that I have come to Feral a few years after the hype surrounding the book, and that it is possible that some of the ideas presented have filtered through other media in the meantime and so seem out of date. So my comments might not reflect a freshness of idea that the book offered when published in 2013 (although I would argue that Rachel Carson made all these arguments and more, with better language and scientific acumen, in the 1960s).
I need space to vent. Content warning: I did not like this book at all.
I found Monbiot's book about rewilding to be one of the most self-indulgent, masculine, and poorly written books I have read. It frequently misrepresents quotes from source material, or makes wild unsubstantiated claims that are either unreferenced or unreliably referenced. When I checked three different references there was no mention of …
I have to admit that I have come to Feral a few years after the hype surrounding the book, and that it is possible that some of the ideas presented have filtered through other media in the meantime and so seem out of date. So my comments might not reflect a freshness of idea that the book offered when published in 2013 (although I would argue that Rachel Carson made all these arguments and more, with better language and scientific acumen, in the 1960s).
I need space to vent. Content warning: I did not like this book at all.
I found Monbiot's book about rewilding to be one of the most self-indulgent, masculine, and poorly written books I have read. It frequently misrepresents quotes from source material, or makes wild unsubstantiated claims that are either unreferenced or unreliably referenced. When I checked three different references there was no mention of the claim that is made - maybe I just happened to hit on poor research sections, but it doesn't bode well for the book's validity.
There is also an extraordinary amount of privilege in the book. Throughout, he refers to absentee landlords (unsubstantiated, unqualified), makes veiled arguments against "foreign" ideas, attacks EU policy, or criticises people's disconnection from nature with broad, thoughtless strokes. He repeatedly criticises the farmers' unions in the UK (saying they are run by the privileged), then at other times quotes the same unions when they agree with his points. He frequently reinforces his own brilliance: The most jaw-dropping instance appearing at the end of the tenth chapter (the best in the book up until the end, where a philosophical farmer Dafydd schools George on complex thinking) he single-handedly solves all problems with wilding and farming. The answer strikes him while walking past a stand of birches: Subsidies should be stopped for large farms. Bravo, George!
(Don't tell him that this argument, and thousands more that follow from it, have been put forward since the early 20th Century, and that there is a wealth of literature on enclosures, commons, privatisation, anti-capitalism and political policy that has not only come up with his idea before, but has developed methods for praxis).
There are good moments, when you see the genuine arguments for rewilding finally put forward, but these appear between upsetting passages where Monbiot either goes into great detail about his love of giant animals (they are all big, macho creatures - he seems to care very little for damselflies, mice, sparrows, etc.) or makes sweeping statements about "farmers", "ecologists", or some other group of people that he places all under one umbrella for the purposes of making a none-too-cogent argument.
The poor use of adjectives, frequently clumsy betrayals of any semblance of neutrality, and the shocking level of masculine bravado paired with post-colonial tunnel vision this book nearly unbearable. I forced myself through it because of the insistence by so many that it is a "must read". It isn't.
