‘I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep,’ he admits. ‘It
occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them.’
His new book,
Feral:
Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding, sounds good even
so. What he means by rewilding is not preserving or controlling ecosystems but
leaving them alone, letting the animals and plants sort things out themselves.
As
Spectator reviewer Sam Leith
puts it:
He dreams of letting forest re-establish itself where
dismal ‘conservationists’ insist on maintaining the desert of heather-and-scrub
that centuries of overgrazing have left us. He wants to see beavers plashing in
our rivers, ospreys, wolves and (ideally) elephant wandering the Welsh hills
and the Scottish highlands, if not the South Downs. He offers well-explained
and meticulously evidenced reasons why rewilding large parts of the country
could be both economically and ecologically advantageous. But he makes no bones
about the deep reason he’s in favour: which is that it would be amazingly cool.
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