Lives in our Death: Rewilding for a Post-Human World.

Apocalyptic visions are getting harder and harder to ignore in the 21^st century; they’re embedded densely in popular culture, the media frequently leans towards intense catastrophic fear-mongering, and many experts are espousing troubling theories about the nearing end-times, including the man who conceived of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, James Lovelock.

            Instead of spurring a drive towards correction, this kind of embedded fear has all too often led to frantic action and bizarre offsetting of fear; Slavoj Žižek observes that in the face of impending sea level rises and the loss of both ice caps, people are instead attracted to (and fed by the media) stories about possible carbon-saving boat travel across the newly created Arctic sea, or the possiblility of Antarctica as an entirely new plain to colonise. This impedes the kind of radical environmental action massively; people are either happy to continue with business as usual or are too pessimistic to do anything proactive.

            Rewilding is definitely proactive and radical; it suggests a drastic change in our approach to natural landscapes to just leave them be, or to reinstate vital aspects of ecosystems that we have helped eradicate (such as large predators) to enable them to be self-sufficient. Many, including George Monbiot in his seminal book on rewilding in Britain, entitled Feral, espouse human-oriented arguments that delve into the spiritual and the economic. I believe that, especially in the case of humans becoming extinct, rewilding is essential simply for the planet.

            As the global landscape stands, especially in Europe, where there are animals, there are fences. We alone can permeate these fences; we bring the animals their feed, we rake away their droppings. The space animals, especially livestock, are allowed to occupy is a liminal space, often without natural function. The same can be observed in some ‘wild’ and natural spaces; conservation organisations created ‘natural disturbance’ to manage the lives of the animals therein, also most likely fenced in. What happens to these animals when we die?

            Presumably, they also die. Without a supply of food, surrounded by their own muck and often separated from breeding partners, these animals will die, and rot, and provide food for the scavenging few that can even make it past the fence such as birds or insects. If this was a rewilded or truly wild space, it would be self-sufficient and naturally functioning. Animal carcasses would of course be present in the landscape, but they would be integrated into the natural processes present just as should occur in the wilderness. Species can roam, breed, interact, spread, just as animals and plants naturally do; they are fluid.

Although the lifetime of a fence is far greater than their own lives, the chance we would give them to be able to live and breed for generations yet to come before the fence finally falls is still a whole lot better than the meagre chance afforded to our pets, zoo occupants, livestock, pitiful nature reserves. To not think of the lives of those we implicate in our own past our species’ extinction is as absurd as assuming that when you die, everyone else dies. Besides, through proactive rewilding, we might even solve some of the apocalyptic issues currently plaguing our planet such as carbon emissions, deforestation, and the terrifying loss of biodiversity the world over.

Mahana: Taking in the backdrop

The main story of Mahana directed by Lee Tamahori is a drama of past romance, a coming-of-age tale, and a tale of rural New Zealand in the 1960s. I do not with to spoil the plot, but more importantly wish to look through this, into the thriving backdrop of culture and environment that pervades the film, based on one of the acclaimed Maori novelist Witi Ihimaera’s books.

            In a colonial and a postcolonial setting, where people are from is important, and speaks volumes about their perception of the world, and their place in it. It oddly took me a while to see the structure of race and culture present in Mahana’s rural mid-twentieth century New Zealand; the main story looks at a rivalry between two Maori Iwi’s (family groups), the titular Mahanas and the Poatas. While these two groups squabble and struggle against one another, the white employers, mostly shown in the character Collins, can take a back seat; they have guaranteed employment, why should they be involved? Indeed, the arguments between the Poatas and the Mahanas incorporate the contracts given out by the white man.

Although the patriarchal grandfather Temehana Mahana owns lands, it is accentuated that he started from nothing, and seeks out contracts for employment from white employers anyway. It is thus interesting that young Simeon and his peer group are so interested in American culture, particularly cowboy films featuring the likes of John Wayne; although in Mahana, the Maoris represented are the cowboys, in the cowboy films native Americans are the enemy, and Maori’s likely suffered similar humiliations and defeats, resulting in the drastic assault on the landscape with European land tenure systems and livestock practices, namely sheep rearing, which the Mahanas have settled into reciprocating and maintaining. While the sheep munch away the environment, changing the landscape, there is a scene wherein the main characters are ‘reduced’ to scrub clearing; not only do they maintain the livestock which has changed the indigenous landscape, they are forced to become the changers of landscape to settle the need for cash income. The Maori culture is attacked in more overt ways throughout; the Maori language is not allowed to be spoken in court and Temehana is fiercely biblical.

 I am also interested in the character of Mr. McKenzie. McKenzie is Simeon’s teacher, and seems to be more progressive, taking Simeon under his wing, and encouraging him to be honest and true to himself. I wonder if the character of McKenzie could be anything other than a Scotsman; the same role filled in with an Englishman or a white New Zealander would have a flattened effect, as their dominance as a teacher would merely be accentuated; but the Scottish are different, they have a culture separate from the English and an ecological history that has been similarly assaulted by capitalist agriculture.

            I am merely flexing my thoughts on culture and environment in this piece, and regret that I do not go into the complexities of feminism apparent in the film; outside of New Zealand, the film was released under the title ‘the Patriarch,’ and it is accentuated throughout the domineering social structures that oppress women in society, both in the mid-twentieth century Maori society, and New Zealand society more broadly.

Thylacine

Here is a poem for world poetry day- I wrote it yesterday after watching some footage one of the last Tasmanian tigers.

Brain; neurons; eyes; glasses lens;

air (microbes, atoms, molecules);

screen protector; screen; video of you;

 84 years; camera film; light; camera lens;

air (microbes, atoms, molecules);

you. Your fur your big head your teeth. The markings on your fur;

I don’t have those, we don’t have those, you had those.

Your snout your eyes your pouch for your young.

Once your were as simple as a raindrop, a spec of sand;

Now you are a fissure of crystal, a double-helix ballet.

You are dead , and alive on my screen,

Removed from you, I do not feel your evident pain.
With you removed, a hole becomes evident, somewhere.

picture from: http://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/382X9zPWq9wRtCgUsbmhcAx/511c15d6-61e2-4631-91bb-009458f522e7.jpg/r0_0_1200_675_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

Reintroducing predators or emulating them; the missing ecological relationship in Britain.

            Near Horsham in West Sussex is a castle estate called ‘Knepp Estate,’ which, alongside farming, has let a great deal of the estate return to the wild. Medium-sized herbivores such as longhorn cattle, roe and fallow deer, Exmoor ponies and pigs roam freely on the estate. So far, these rewilding techniques have regenerated the soil’s nutrient quality, making farming once again viable near the site, whereas traditional intensive farming had rendered the soil unworkable without large quantities of chemical fertiliser; farming is finally profitable once again in the area.

            The benefits of rewilding are numerous; vastly increased biodiversity and carbon sequestration, as well as social benefits such as those George Monbiot wrote about in Feral; the sense of adventure and wonder that is lost without true, unadultered wilderness. The cause of this article is not to reiterate these benefits. I am simply looking at a common cause for human intervention in rewilding projects; fencing out or culling herbivores.

Knepp estate has had to fence off certain areas of land to guarantee that young trees and other vegetation will survive undamaged by the grazing and browsing habits of the herbivores present. It is the intensive grazing of the ‘white plague’ of sheep and other large herbivores such as deer and cattle, kept for commercial use, that has helped transform the British Isles into monolithic and expansive grassland. As a natural process in a pre-human past, grazing and other herbivorous habits helped create mosaic-like environments of grassland, scrub and woodland believed to have existed in the Pleistocene era. In the Pleistocene, however, there were predators to maintain herbivore population and also their behaviours and approaches to their environment. The herbivores that existed were also diverse in species and especially size, with even Britain hosting megafauna; the skeletons of ancient hippopotami have been found underneath central London. Interestingly enough, Knepp Estate’s aims are to add more species of herbivore, to include elk and bison.

            Dundreggan, an area that rewilding organisation Trees For Life have been working on in the Scottish Highlands, has had success by fencing out the red deer that are endemic to the area. The result has been a surge in young tree growth and inception, sometimes species that one wouldn’t expect to find, all without much human planting necessary. The biodiversity in the area is vibrant, with more than 3,000 new species recorded in Dundreggan alone. The area is lacking a natural predator, specifically the wolf; were a wolf present, the organisation would no longer need to fence out the deer, as the wolves would maintain their population by preying on the weak and sickly deer, altering the deer behaviour by scaring them away from open spaces, such as open land on the fringes of forests, and also stretches of open water where a deer may be more at risk. This has a chain reaction, that has been highlighted with the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in America; as the deer left open water alone, trees were allowed to grow along the waters edge, shading and cooling down the water, making it habitable for fish and other animals which helped filter the water of impurities. Knepp estate fenced off an area of newly-planted trees along the Adur river, to eventually grow to cover the water and cool it down, in a venture the Ouze & Adure River Trust termed ‘trees for trout,’ and effect which  Yellowstone has achieved through the reintroduction of natural predators.

 Tree Planting Along the River Adur at Knepp Estate. Author’s own image.

Trees for life currently run a volunteering programme called ‘project wolf’ wherein volunteers emulate wolf behaviour to scare deer away from the vulnerable rewilded areas. Many concerned with reintroducing a natural predator to the British Isles have claimed that the Eurasian lynx would be the least problematic predator to reintroduce to the British wild lands. With a Pleistocene rewilding project such as Knepp Estate, what predator should be present? If one could be decided upon, in this present day with many stakeholders in rural areas so set against the reintroduction of predators, could it be emulated, such as the project wolf campaign? The estate already cull their animals to maintain a natural population, and so the need for a natural predator has not gone unobserved. Species are being reintroduced in Britain, albeit at a slow pace, and the predator question is enshrouded in cultural myths of fear, which forces rewilding organisations to sadly intervene where another ecological relationship has been persecuted and removed over time.

Referenced:

http://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/rewilding/rewilding-projects/knepp-estate

http://www.knepp.co.uk/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/volunteer/long-term-volunteering/project-wolf/

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/dundreggan/

http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/dundreggan/biodiversity/

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/hippos-thames-dung-beetle-fossils-reveal-elephants-rhinoceroses-roamed-prehistoric-europe-1438715

Thoughts on 'The Hunter' (2011)

Martin has a decision to make; allow for the loss of lives over an indefinite period of time due to his inaction, or the loss of a single life wherein Martin will be pulling the trigger. The details; should Martin allow for the on-going deaths of humans, some of which he has grown an attachment to, some who are children, all of whom are innocent, or, should he kill the last surviving Tasmanian tiger, who, for all we know, has suffered the loss of all companions in the world.

            The decision seems obliquely obvious; kill the damned tiger, people have died, people will die, all because of a classic mean-capitalist intention. In the narrative of The Hunter, the destruction of the environment is too far gone. Martin is in Tasmania, under the guise of an academic researcher, to hunt down the last remaining Tasmanian tiger for its unique venom, which he will be paid handsomely by his employers for. Along the way, Martin discovers that the hunt for the animal is a covert industrial war-ground; rival arms industries lust for the venom for replication, sending man after man to their death out in the wilds of Tasmania, usually at the hands of each other, ironically considering the underlying assertions that the environment is the main danger. While this battle is waged, an overt struggle continues in the human world; unemployed loggers engage in aggressive tensions with the environmental groups who are intent on keeping the wilderness untouched. Few are aware of the hunt for the Tasmanian tiger, but a few key figures are, and have been involved in the shady business. There is a strange feeling that the hunt underpins the issues faced by the entire community, thus lending more to the feeling that the animal must die.

            When Dafoe finally lures the animal within his range, and slays it, it is not for the initial reason; he completely destroys the body, and informs his employers that there is no longer a Tasmanian tiger left to hunt. The Tasmanian tiger’s body, in this film, is not a cherished or sad image, a reflection of humanity’s impact on benign creatures across the globe; the Tasmanian tiger’s body is a product, which Martin renders useless.

            If we are to see the Tasmanian tiger as a poignant and pitiable creature, then its death is somewhat of a mercy. Its life is alone in the alien landscape of the Tasmanian bush, lured to a hunter with old meat, showing perhaps that its life was an ending struggle. It’s loneliness is accentuated by the tight communities that humans have formed on the cusp of its environment; on a larger scale, the hippy group are welcoming and caring, and even the loggers have each other, and a hub, the bar, a constant and reassuring meeting point. On a smaller scale, the family Martin stays with are obviously warmer than he’s apparently used to, and even Jack, who seems to exist alone, has obvious and full interactions with various groups. The Tasmanian tiger is alone, scared, dying. It’s death allows for the continuation of the various human communities. However, if the body-as-product were to be used for its saught after purpose, then lives would still be lost due to the fabrication of whatever weapon Martin’s employers deigned to create. With this product uselessed, future deaths are negated. Martin pulls the trigger.

referenced: The Hunter, 2011, dir. Dan Nettheim