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In the turbulent start of the new century, George Monbiot was unmarked with a book-shaped knocker called Heat: how to stop global warming . After a long decade, the hottest ever recorded by humans, the British author and activist is unmarked with a new appeal, Wild (Captain Swing), in which he advocates the need to "renaturalize" the planet, starting by ourselves.
" The great disconnection with nature is the root of our great problems and is something that has been taking shape for centuries," Monbiot warns. "Our goal has long been to conquer nature, with this dominant mentality so characteristic of the human condition. But the time has come to change our attitude radically: we have to stop seeing nature as our enemy ."
"The disconnection of which I speak does not start with the Industrial Revolution, but rather with the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago," says Monbiot. "Our eagerness to channel the water to regulate the floods and to irrigate the irrigation goes back to the Mesopotamian era. Cities are born on the banks of the rivers, but there is always that fear, that need to control water with dams, or otherwise civilization would collapse. "
"And it is now when we are finally beginning to recognize that this struggle against nature, and eager to conquer, can be very destructive to the living world and to ourselves," says the British naturalist, who applied the story and decided "Renaturalize" your life by temporarily leaving the "civilized" Oxford to remote Wales to write "Wild."
After all, his field experience started in Indonesia, Brazil or in East Africa, literally playing life as an investigative journalist to report environmental abuses. He worked for a while at the BBC Natural History Unit and, despite admiring David Attenborough, was very critical of nature's "escapist" programs that hide the destruction caused by the human species.
George Monbiot (London, 1963) has been perhaps the most notorious voice in the United Kingdom in the face of climate change, controversial for its "moral defense" of nuclear energy, pioneer of the "oil divestment" movement. Now, with "Wild", rewilding has become a world reference, which he defends as one of the most pressing responses to the "climate crisis."
" Rewilding is neither more nor less than the massive restoration of ecosystems," Monbiot explains. "There are many connotations, and people may sound like the reintroduction of species such as the wolf or the lynx. But the notion goes much further. If there is something wonderful in nature it is its ability to regenerate. I have been able to verify it with experiences such as those of Transylvania and Croatia, where there has been a great recovery of ecosystems after the abandonment of agricultural land, or in the Netherlands, where there are currently more than 200 rewilding projects underway that have also allowed a regeneration of the economies local".
But "renaturation," Monbiot warns, does not consist in simply "withdrawing" from the hand of man ... "What I claim is precisely a commitment of man to nature, a new relationship to restore lost contact and "highlight" our lives, starting with those of children, who for decades have been "educated" with their backs to the world that surrounds and sustains us. "
" Rewilding is about allowing nature to find its way, and that also includes our cities," says Monbiot, who sets the example of the Renaturalization project of the Manzanares River in Madrid (conceived by Ecologists in Action). On a large scale, the British author warns, rewilding is one of the solutions to climate change and goes far beyond simple reforestation.
" Trees are, in fact, the best natural invention for carbon sequestration, " he acknowledges. "But planting for planting, with" forestry "criteria and in totally unnatural rows, also leaving an undesirable plastic trace of the greenhouses, is not the most desirable. The solution would be to encourage the creation of wooded areas, allowing trees to propagate by themselves and grow as parts of an ecosystem. "
And this is when Monbiot, a supporter of "permanence", shouts in the sky over the EU agricultural subsidy policy that in his opinion has allowed the destruction of natural habitats in Europe. " Sheep are as destructive as cars, " he warns. "There is much talk about the impact of livestock on climate change, and little about the impact they have on the land. Pastures for sheep occupy four million hectares in the United Kingdom, and their contribution to the food pie is 1%." .
Monbiot emphasizes how the United Kingdom, after Brazil, is the country with the highest concentration of land ownership ... "And although here we don't have fires like those of the Amazon, we have that destructive process of natural habitats that reach our parks natural, which has virtually eliminated our native forests and has threatened more than a quarter of our mammals. "
As an activist, Monbiot believes that the coming to power of leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump "is especially dangerous." "Their destructive policies affect the rest of the world and slow down the action in times of climatic emergency like the one we live in," he warns. "Because calling climate change what is happening is like calling an invading army" unexpected visitor. We need a more appropriate and pressing terminology that reflects the existential crisis we are facing. "
The Guardian's star columnist, George Monbiot has also accompanied Greta Thunberg as he passed through the United Kingdom in a recent documentary and has come out in his defense against the darts received in recent weeks: "See the typical well-off and white men attacking in that way against a 16-year-old student with Asperger serves to confirm that something is happening effectively. Movements such as Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion have radically changed the speech. For the first time in many years I begin to be optimistic. "
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