Planet and PEOPLE

It’s time to talk about ‘re-wilding’. The separation of people from nature, the ‘pretence that removing humans from an area will make nature ‘Year Zero’ fascism that pretends that humans can be removed from an ecosystem. There are no truly wild places on the planet. Everywhere is invaded by litter, microplastics, radiofrequency radiation, CO2, invasive species, roads, pipelines, power lines. ‘Rewilding’ is a lie.

In Africa we are seeing the Masai driven out of their traditional lands and their culture and way of life destroyed because of ‘rewilding’ driven by tourism. The native Americans had no place in the US National Parks. And the Highlanders, treated by the colonial authorities as savages, were driven out to create shooting estates.

Read the Statistical Accounts for Scotland. Note how so many ministers reported how healthy the highlanders were, how little crime there was; read Osgood Mackenzie reporting how every inch of now barren land was once cared for, the ground nesting bees, the vast numbers of birds he shot. The Gaels lived with and respected nature for a thousand years, just like other so-called ‘indigenous’ peoples, until capitalism arrived.

Highland was never ‘wild’. It is a fantasy of Victorian industrialists and royalty who, tired of living with the hellish cities they had created, fancied a ‘wild playground’ to escape to, and of course, exploit for profit in any way they could – kelp, sheep, deer and grouse shooting, minerals, commercial forestry, aluminium smelting, nuclear power, military training, exclusive tourism, ‘carbon offsets’, and so on.

Everywhere industrialisation has meant a sustainable culture and environment has been systematically undermined and destroyed for private greed. And that process continues.

Before rewilding:

mutually supportive communities of people and nature that have evolved and adapted to each other over centuries. With huge potential for planet and people to thrive and flourish through investment in appropriate technology. Read Osgood Mackenzie and weep.

After rewilding:

an empty post-industrial wasteland, devoid of people or biodiversity. Barren shooting estates, green deserts full of pylons, 5G masts, superquarries, any dirty development that’s better out of sight and out of mind; military installations and training grounds, rocket launching sites, nuclear submarines and bombing ranges, dirty decommissioning of oil rigs and ships, and probably nuclear reactors too (think Dounreay); prospecting for gold is starting right now on the Gairloch estate in the heart of the ‘Wester Ross Biosphere’ ). In a ‘wild’ place, emptied of its people, no-one knows or cares what you do.

A ‘wild’ area is really a place to ‘go wild in’, where the super-rich can do as they please with impunity. And that usually involves making money, exercising total control, and killing living beings to demonstrate their power.

It is also a safety valve for a controlled, oppressed, urban ghetto population, who might be permitted occasionally to drive a rented vehicle along the NC500 for a ‘safari experience’ – so long as they take everything we need with them from the city, and keep the windows shut against midges and ‘any remaining wild’ locals. Until some new ‘pandemic’ drives them all back into their city ghettoes because ‘wild’ bats, birds, animals, threaten to spread viruses to us. (The super-rich, note, will continue to fly about as they please in their private jets and helicopters)

Rewilding is a con. It is the destruction of independent local food production, ethnic cleansing, the final destruction of our Gaelic cultural heritage. Forget any genuine concern for people or planet – this is traditional colonialism, only for the pleasure and profit of the super-rich.

This is all really just the old colonial / American way. Set aside some areas for ‘nature’ (National Parks), or for ‘native peoples’ (Reservations) – but only until you might find that inconvenient. Sooner or later, ’eminent domain’, or ‘force majeure’ (aka naked violence) always allows the wealthy to just grab and destroy anything and everything. Because they can do as they please, and expect to. Protests are banned. The entire planet and its people only exist to deliver ‘stakeholder value’. And only the plutocrats are stakeholders now. Planet and people have no real ‘stake’ in anything anymore.

‘Rewild’ the cities, yes of course – who wouldn’t rather live in a real jungle than a concrete one? Cities are places where nature is tames and largey excluded; centres of centralised power and wealth based on exploitation. In the 21st century, with modern technology, we no longer need them. We can access jobs, goods and services from home in the countryside and no longer need to tolerate city pollution, crime, loneliness and mental illness.

In the rural areas there is now a great opportunity to revitalise and regenerate. And nature and people need each other. Adam and Eve were gardeners. Voltaire said we have to get back to the garden. A garden is a space where, working together, life creates abundance. Where the world can have the space to grow and flourish. Where all living beings benefit. My grandfather was a pioneer of Letchworth Garden City, north of London. At the time is was a great step forward from the horrors of victorian urbanisation. But the world has moved on from ‘rus in urbe’ – the illusion of countryside in the town and with the internet, and local on demand production and recycling, cities are obsolete. We can build a healthy, working, sustainable, decentralised landscape of human scale communities, an interdependent human ecosystem integrated with the planet, not separate from it.

We do not need factory-produced fake food. We do not need vast, energy hungry infrastructures of exploitation and oppression like massive electricity grids or 5G. We certainly don’t need to deliberate creation of scarcity to drive demand for and dependence on ‘services’ and products that just make life worse. Nature can provide more than enough for everyone’s needs, and in do doing heal itself too.

Let’s have no more ‘rewilding’. Let’s reject the whole idea that we might be happy owning nothing. Because planet and people are not separate, and they / we only ‘belong’ to ourselves. We already have everything and the plutocrats with their narcissism, psychopathy, and desperate underlying fear are the cause of the planetary crisis not the solution. There is nothing they can usefully do for us because capitalism is built on the avoidance of responsibility: it is the reason why we have ‘limited companies’. In such a world, where there is no reciprocity, the powerful have nothing to offer us in return. They can’t even protect us or the planet from their own greed. The World Economic Forum wants to ‘make the world a better place’ – but only for itself. There is no such thing as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’.

We urgently need to take responsibility for our planet and our future, and stop being driven by fear and despair. And just get on with it. Nobody will do it for us.

We need to take back control of our democracy, our economy, our communities, bodies and minds. We need to grow our own food, generate our own energy, empower people, we need the Great Rebirth of human decency, mutual respect, common sense.