Feral

by George Monbiot

  The incredible biological abundance of North America was also a post-crash phenomenon. We’ve heard about the flocks of passenger pigeons darkening the sky for days, the tens of millions of bison trampling the great plains, the rivers so thick with spawning salmon that you could barely row a boat, the seashores teeming with life, the deep forests on which a squirrel could go from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the ground. We don’t know what North America would have looked like with no humans at all, but we do know it didn’t look like that under the ‘Indians’. Bone excavations show that passenger pigeons were not even common in the 1400s. ‘Indians’ specifically targeted pregnant deer and wild turkeys before they laid eggs, to eliminate competition for maize and tree nuts. They routinely burned forests to keep them convenient for human use. And they kept salmon and shellfish populations down by eating them, and thereby suppressed populations of other creatures that ate them. When human populations crashed, nonhuman populations exploded.11

  Gruesome events–some accidental, others deliberately genocidal–wiped out the great majority of the hemisphere’s people and the rich and remarkable societies they created. In many parts of the Americas the only humans who remained were–like the survivors in a post-holocaust novel–hunter-gatherers. Some belonged to tribes which had long practised that art, others were forced to reacquire lost skills as a result of civilizational collapse. Disease made cities lethal: only dispersed populations had a chance of avoiding epidemics. Dispersal into small bands of hunter-gatherers made economic complexity impossible. The forests blotted out memories of what had gone before. Humanity’s loss was nature’s gain.

  The impacts of the American genocides might have been felt throughout the northern hemisphere. Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird at Stanford University have speculated that the recovering forests drew so much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere–about ten parts per million–that they could have helped to trigger the cooling between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries known as the Little Ice Age.12 The short summers and long cold winters, the ice fairs on the Thames and the deep cold depicted by Pieter Brueghel might have been caused partly as a result of the extermination of the Native Americans. (There is little danger that rewilding would cause a little ice age today: human activity has raised carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere by over one hundred parts per million.)

  If another fascinating speculation is correct, Native American civilization may have begun with a similar impact. The biologist Felisa Smith proposes that the extermination of the American megafauna by Mesolithic hunters was responsible for another mini ice age, the Younger Dryas,*5 which began 12,800 years ago and lasted for 1,300 years.13

  The wild herbivores of the Americas were, like cattle and sheep, magnificently flatulent. Smith calculates that they produced around 10 million tonnes of methane a year. Methane is a greenhouse gas, active for a shorter period than carbon dioxide, but, while it persists, around twenty times as powerful. The sharp decline in methane production when the large herbivores became extinct might have been sufficient to account for the collapse in temperatures (a global decline of between 9 and 12° Centigrade) at about the same time. If this is correct (it is one of a number of competing explanations), the history of the first peoples of the Americas was bookended by catastrophe and climate change.

  In his masterpiece Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama explores the narratives and impulses which gave rise to what could be described as Nazi rewilding projects.14 One of the most powerful myths of German nationhood arose from a remarkable event that took place 2,000 years ago in the great primeval forests around the River Weser, that the Germans later called the Teutoburger Wald. The people of these forests, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, were wild and free. They worshipped beneath the trees and offered human sacrifices to the god of the woods. Uncorrupted by luxury, dressed only in pelts and cloaks, they were, he claimed, chaste, tough and massive. These Cheruscan tribesmen were the people organized by the man Tacitus called Arminius and the Germans call Hermann.

  Hermann was the son of a German chief captured by the Romans. He was recruited into the Roman army and rose through its ranks, but he never forgot his tribal identity. He raised a rebellion in the urwald, and in AD 9 the wild men he commanded ambushed the Roman army commanded by Publius Quintilius Varus, which was marching through the great forest to its winter quarters. The Cheruscan savages trapped Varus’s 25,000 men between swamps and wildwood, and speared to death all but a handful of the decadent, complacent empire’s troops. From this unlikely victory a compelling but ultimately lethal myth was born.

  From the late fifteenth century onwards, Germans began to portray themselves as the descendants of wild and natural beings who pursued an uncorrupted existence in a woodland arcadia. By the mid-eighteenth century, the forests in which Hermann defeated the civilized Romans began to embody the authentic fatherland–raw, free and strong.

  Wald and Volk–forest and people–were explicitly connected by Nazi ideologists. In 1941, when the German army launched its attack on the Soviet Union and overran eastern Poland, Hermann Göring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, seized the Białowieża Forest–the urwald preserved through the centuries as a royal hunting estate–and declared it his private property. The government conservation department he had established then set to work to create a vast national park around the ancient forest, from which the people were cleared (and many murdered) with customary Nazi cruelty.15 The land was rewilded by brute force.

  Göring’s brutalities in eastern Poland were an extreme form of what the Normans did in England. Their forest law annexed large tracts of countryside. ‘Forest’ meant not a place where trees grew but a place foris–or outside–the usual rule of law. Elsewhere the use of the land was often widely shared, but these tracts (some of which were treeless) were subject to the harsher and less accommodating demands of the royal hunt. In some cases forest law cleared the inhabitants out, in others it curtailed their rights and reduced their living. Like Göring, William I and his court were obsessed by the chase, and they saw the capture and creation of new hunting grounds as one of the perquisites of conquest. The forest laws were brutally extended by the Black Acts of the eighteenth century, documented in E. P. Thompson’s book Whigs and Hunters.16 The new hanging offences they created were designed to discourage local people from defending themselves against the creeping encroachment upon their crops and rights by the king’s deer and the royal hunt.

  The principles of forest law were exported to the British colonies. In Kenya, the colonial authorities evicted local inhabitants from land they designated as game reserves, which later became national parks and nature reserves. The evictions were justified on the grounds that the presence of people and their domestic animals was incompatible with the preservation of wildlife. This, coming from a settler population which had made an abattoir of the savannahs, was rich. In fact it was only because the indigenous people had not destroyed the herds of wild animals with which they had lived up to and beyond the arrival of the British in East Africa that the Europeans wanted to annex and conserve their lands. Only wardens, rangers and paying tourists were allowed into the parks and reserves. If the people who had lived on those lands tried to return to them, they would be treated as trespassers or poachers.

  When I worked in East Africa in the early 1990s, this process of enclosure was being extended in both Kenya and Tanzania. Already the Maasai had lost all but two of their dry season grazing lands, and were now in danger of losing the remainder. With the help of a British conservation group, the Maasai had just been expelled from the Mkomazi Game Reserve in northern Tanzania. They were dumped in the surrounding farmland, where they were promptly arrested for criminal trespass and fined. They tried to return to the reserve, but when they arrived they were once more arrested for criminal trespass and fined. Their cattle died of starvation.

  In Kenya I met Maasai herdsmen who had been hospitalized by rangers working for the Kenya Wildlife
Service when they tried to return to their dry-season pastures. When I challenged the then-director of the service, Dr Richard Leakey, about these policies, he produced a brutally utilitarian defence of enclosure and clearance. ‘The setting aside of land for the purpose of wildlife conservation, to support the tourist industry, is a strategic issue. The morality of evicting people from land, whether it’s to establish a wheat scheme, a barley scheme, hydroelectric scheme or a wildlife tourist scheme is the same. Basically nation states have got to function.’17

  The campaign to create the Yellowstone National Park in the United States–the world’s first national park–was also assisted by potential revenues from tourism. Though Yellowstone’s champions, such as Thomas Meagher, Cornelius Hedges and Ferdinand Hayden, were motivated by their love for the land, the proposal was to a large extent driven and financed by Jay Cooke, owner of the Northern Pacific Railroad.18 He hoped that the tourist trade would boost his railway’s income. (Cooke failed to benefit from its establishment in 1872, however, as his company collapsed in 1873.)

  The act which created the park states that the land

  is hereby reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale under the laws of the United States . . . and all persons who shall locate, or settle upon, or occupy the same or any part therof, except as hereinafter provided, shall be considered trespassers and removed therefrom.19

  The provision was necessary to preserve the character of the land from encroachment by European Americans, at a time in which the West was being rapidly transformed. But Congress overlooked the fact that it had been settled for some 11,000 years, and appears still to have been used by the Crow, the Shoshone Tukadika and the Blackfoot.*6 They too were transformed into trespassers in the park and were eventually removed therefrom. The act preserving Yellowstone–and its clearance of native people–became the model for the creation of national parks throughout the Union, and in many other parts of the world.

  Though the mores of modern wildlife agencies are not comparable to those of the Nazis, there are common themes, which long predate the Third Reich and which have continued long beyond its collapse, informing a process that could be described as forced rewilding.

  Since Schama’s book was published, further research has cast new light on Nazi attitudes to nature and attempts at rewilding. Fascinating papers by Boria Sax and Martin Brüne summarize recent discoveries about the dark side of Professor Konrad Lorenz.21 Lorenz, an Austrian, is widely considered to be the founder of the modern science of animal behaviour (ethology). His work in this field won a Nobel prize. But we now know that he was also responsible for helping to formulate some of the unscientific tenets of Nazi ideology. He advocated a programme of eugenics whose purpose was to rewild human nature, by stripping people of what he considered to be the genetic legacy of civilization.

  Lorenz sought scientific justifications for Friedrich Nietzsche’s attempt to equate the civilization of humans with the domestication of animals. In both cases, Lorenz claimed, the result was genetic decline and the disruption of what Nietzsche celebrated as instinctive behaviour, leading to social breakdown, degeneracy, indiscriminate breeding, a lack of patriotic enthusiasm and eventual human extinction. He appeared to endorse the view of the ancient Greeks that, as he put it, ‘a handsome man can never be bad and an ugly man can never be good’.22 He listed the physical characteristics which he said were caused by both human civilization and the domestication of animals–rounded heads, shortened limbs, pot bellies–which happened to correspond with popular Nazi stereotypes of Jewish physiognomy. He coined a term for this supposed transformation: Verhausschweinung, or pig domestication.

  Immediately after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria) in 1938, Lorenz joined the Nazi party. He became a member of its Office for Race Policy and proposed a programme of eugenics which exceeded even the scheme overseen by Heinrich Himmler. Lorenz believed that humans could be bred to meet not only a physical ideal but also an ethical one. He argued that it was not just those with ‘domesticated’ physiques who should not be allowed to reproduce, but also those possessed of ‘domesticated’ instincts. Those selected for breeding, on the other hand, would form not just a master race but a master species of instinctive, wild beings. He advocated the ‘extermination of ethically inferior people’ and conducted a study of the children of marriages between Germans and Poles, which led to those assessed as genetically deficient being dispatched to concentration camps.23

  His notions of racial purity corresponded to Nazi conceptions of wildness. By sharp contrast to most European thinking in the nineteenth century, Sax explains, the Nazis saw nature not as lawless and chaotic but as ordered and standardized. They compared themselves to wild predators which, they believed, had an inherent right to rule the ecosystem. After the war, Lorenz pursued this analogy, though now in coded form. He claimed, wrongly, that domestic dogs had two genetic origins: the northern wolf and the Mesopotamian jackal. Dogs descended from wolves, he believed, inherited the characteristics of animals which form ‘a sworn and very exclusive band which sticks together through thick and thin and whose members will defend each other to the very death’.24 Dogs descended from jackals, by contrast, were obedient, but infantile and lacking in loyalty. These traits corresponded to Nazi characterizations of the ‘Aryan’ tribes of the North from which they claimed the Germans were descended, versus the ‘degenerate’ peoples of the South among whom, they maintained, the Jews arose.

  An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right. The extract from D. H. Lawrence’s poem The Mountain Lion with which I began this chapter hints at this conjunction of interests. In his book The English Novel, Terry Eagleton notes that while Lawrence ‘regarded fascism as a spurious solution to the crisis of middle-class civilization’, there are elements of his thinking–racism and anti-Semitism among them–

  which sail perilously close to the fascist creed. . . . at his most dangerous he invites us to discard rationality as itself a kind of alienation, and think with the blood and racial instincts instead. It was this aspect of his work which Bertrand Russell considered led straight to Auschwitz.25 *7

  The British millionaire John Aspinall, who died in 2000, made his money running gambling dens. He made his name spending this money on the zoos he founded–Howlett’s and Port Lympne in Kent–where his breeding programmes enjoyed great success. He fetishized the tigers he kept. He encouraged his keepers to interact freely with them, with the result that three of them were mauled to death (two others were trampled to death by his elephants). When he was dying of cancer, Aspinall tried to induce his tigers to kill him too.

  He believed that the human race was ‘vermin’26 and announced that ‘Britain’s population problem can be solved by beneficial genocide’.27 He maintained that ‘the concept of the sanctity of human life is the most damaging that philosophy has ever propagated’28 (his zoo-keeping policy was, it seems, consistent with that belief). He professed himself a supporter of Hitler’s views on eugenics,29 and described his third wife as ‘a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable’.30 He worked with Mangosuthu Buthelezi to undermine the African National Congress and forestall majority rule in South Africa. With Lord Lucan (who later disappeared after allegedly bludgeoning his children’s nanny to death) and the financier Sir James Goldsmith, he discussed the possibility of launching a military coup against Harold Wilson’s Labour government.31

  Joy Adamson’s book Born Free, published in 1960, about bringing up and then releasing a pet lioness in Kenya, was wildly successful. The portrayal of her character and behaviour in the book and the Oscar-winning film that dramatized it was pure fiction. In reality she possessed a strong suite of what might have been psychopathic traits. She got what she wanted through a combination of manipulation and volcanic eruptions of temper. While devoting great care and attention to the lions, leopards and cheetahs she looked after,
she appeared to have few scruples about the way she treated people, especially her African servants, and little understanding of the hurt she caused.

  Her biographer, Caroline Cass, records that when a boy who worked in her kitchen took too long to deliver her tea, Adamson threw it in his face, scalding him.32 When her cook spoilt the soup, she dragged him before the magistrate, and demanded, unsuccessfully, that he be beaten by the police. She forced another servant, who was seriously injured with third-degree burns as a result of an accident, to walk eight miles to the clinic for treatment, refusing to drive him as a punishment for his carelessness.

  Adamson’s first public lectures on the world tour she began in 1961 were entitled ‘Man: the inferior species’. She threatened to shoot the keepers in Sydney zoo, after alleging that they were mistreating their lions. In Kenya she demanded that the colonial authorities give her 30,000 acres of land belonging to native people so that her pets could use it. When she was eventually murdered by a former servant, the investigation was delayed by a surfeit of possible culprits. Cass notes that ‘Few people were surprised that Joy may have been killed by an African. The general opinion was that Joy got what she deserved, treating them so appallingly, forgetting to pay their wages and dismissing them with extreme rudeness and little regard for their welfare.’33

  The Nazis’ interest in re-creating what they considered to be the natural order was not confined to predators. They wanted to restore the entire ecology of the primeval forests. A reinvented urwald, they believed, required an urox.

  The last giant aurochs died in Poland in 1627. The date is recent enough for the animal still to haunt Polish culture and language. Men of impressive physique, for example, are not ‘built like a brick shithouse’, as they are in Britain, but ‘built like an aurochs’. It is a good simile.