George Monbiot (January 27, 1963) is a naturalist and visionary who has studied "rewilding." An example of rewilding happened in Slovenia. (Slovenia was once part of Yugoslavia and now is a part of the European union. It has a small border on the Adriatic.) Monbiot in his book Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013) describes landscape where fauna and flora bloom again. Sometimes this is after dreadful pain:
"The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before. Humanity’s loss was nature’s gain." That loss is mentioned as the desertion of the countryside as people moved to urban areas, as well as atrocities from the 40s. Now this part of Slovenia (Kočevje) is reforested with all that implies for the environment: "The rewilding of the western side of Slovenia, the rapid regrowth of forests there and the recovery of its populations of bears, wolves, lynx, wild boar, ibex, martens, giant owls and other remarkable creatures, took place at the expense of its human population." Monbiot's vision intrigues partly because of his erudite and creative reweaving of historical themes.
This vision Monbiot extends to places like England, where he can imagine lions wild, as well as beavers. He is not talking about some regression of humanity, when he discusses rewilding. His aims are " ‘not about abandoning civilisation but about enhancing it [...] to “love not man the less, but Nature more”.’
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