Rewild your kids - Village Magazine

 —  October – November 2013

HREE weeks old, warm and gently

snoring on my shoulder as I write,

you are closer to nature than you

will ever be again. With your animal

needs and animal cries, moved by a slow pri-

mordial spirit that will soon be submerged in

the cacophony of thought and language, you

belong, it seems to me, more to the biosphere

than to the human sphere. Already it feels

like years since I saw you, my second daugh-

ter, in the scan, your segmented skeleton

revealed like an ancient beast uncovered by

geologists, buried in the rock of ages. Already

I have begun to entertain the hopes and fears

to which every parent has succumbed, per-

haps since the early hominids laid down the

prints which show that the human spark had

been struck.

Let me begin at the beginning, with the

organisation to which you might owe your life.

When I was born, almost  years ago, in the

bitter winter of , the National Health

Service was just  years old. It must still

have been hard for people to believe that – for

the ﬁrst time in the history of these islands

– they could fall ill without risking ﬁnancial

ruin, that no one need die for want of funds.

I see this system as the summit of civilisation,

one of the wonders of the world.

Now it is so much a part of our lives that

it is just as hard to believe that we might lose

it. But I fear that, when you have reached my

age, free, universal healthcare will be a dis-

tant fantasy, a mythologised arcadia as far

removed from the experience of your chil-

dren’s generation as the Blitz was from mine.

One of the lessons you will learn, painfully

and reluctantly, is that nothing of public

value exists which has not been fought for.

The growth of this system was one of the

remarkable features of the ﬁrst half of the

period through which I have lived. Then,

wealth was widely shared and the power of

those who had monopolised it was shaken.

Taxation was used without embarrassment as

a means of redistributing the commonwealth

of humanity. This great social progress is also

being rolled back, and, though perhaps I am

getting ahead of myself, I fear for your later

years. My generation appears to be squan-

dering your birthright.

This destruction echoes our treatment

of the natural world. In my childhood, it

would never have occurred to me that birds

as common as the cuckoo, the sparrow and

the starling could suﬀer so rapid a decline

that I would live to see them classed as

endangered in this country. I remember the

astonishing variety of moths that clustered

on the windows on warm summer nights, the

eels, dense as wickerwork, moving downri-

ver every autumn, ﬁeld mushrooms nosing

through grassy meadows in their thousands.

These are sights that you might never see. By

the time your children are born, the tiger, the

rhino, the blueﬁn tuna and many of the other

animals that have so enthralled me could be

nothing but a cause of regret.

We now have a better understanding than

we did when I was born – a year after Silent

Spring was published – of the natural limits

within which we live. The science of plane-

tary boundaries has begun to establish the

points beyond which the natural resources

Rewild your kids

Contact, attachment some defence in world collapsing

socially and environmentally. By George Monbiot

ENVIRONMENT reWilding

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caption

here

which make our lives viable can no longer be

sustained. Already, this tells us, we may have

trespassed across three of the nine bounda-

ries, and we are pushing towards three others.

You may live to see the extremes of climate

change I have spent much of my life hoping

we can avert, accompanied by further eco-

logical disasters, such as the acidiﬁcation of

the oceans, the loss of most of the world’s

remaining forests, its wetlands and fossil

water reserves, its large predators, ﬁsh and

coral reefs. If so, you will doubtless boggle at

the stupidity and short-sightedness of those

who preceded you. No one can claim that we

were not warned.

There is another possible route, which I

have spent the past two years researching and

to which I have decided to devote much of the

rest of my working life. This is a positive envi-

ronmentalism, which envisages the rewilding

– the ecological restoration – of large tracts

of unproductive land and over-exploited sea.

It recognises nature’s remarkable capacity to

recover, to re-establish the complex web of

ecological relationships through which, so far,

we have crudely blundered. Rather than ﬁght-

ing only to arrest destruction, it proposes a

better, richer world, a place in which, I hope,

you would delight to live.

There is one respect at least in which

this country and many others have already

become better places. I believe that family

life, contrary to the assertions of politicians

and newspapers, is now better than it has

been for centuries, as the old, cold model of

detached parenting and the damage – psy-

chological, neurological and (some research

suggests) epigenetic – that it appears to have

caused ﬁnally begins to disappear.

Perhaps the greatest source of hope and

social progress arises from our rediscov-

ery of the animal needs of babies and young

children: the basic requirements of com-

fort, contact and attachment. Yes, attached

parenting is taxing (now you are beginning

to writhe and rumble and I fear that your

mother, exhausted from a night of almost

constant feeding, will soon have to wake

again), but it is, I believe, the one sure foun-

dation of a better world. Knowing what we

now know, we have an opportunity to avert

the damage, the unrequited needs that have

caused so many social ills, which lie perhaps

at the root of war, of destructive greed, of the

need to dominate.

So this is where hope lies: right at the

beginning, with the recognition that you,

like all of us, arose from and belong to the

natural world.

This article ﬁrst appeared in the Guardian.

www.monbiot.com