Groundbreakers is Lyons' celebration of the boar. It is simultaneously a study of the boar, their nature, and their place in the environment. But the book is also a look at how humans relate to wildlife in general, and boar in particular. How these animals are perceived, and how that perception changes. But the boar's return is not, in itself natural. As Lyon writes:
Their rise has been abetted by our own environmental damage, because an organism is more likely to become destructive – and therefore invasive – in a foreign ecosystem if we have erased the native species that might otherwise have stopped it gaining a foothold.
In other words, the boar have been returned to a place that is not the one they used to occupy. It is one transformed in time and space. Indeed the boar themselves are different, some of them carrying the genes that result from their breeding with domestic pigs.
The comeback of wild boar in mainland Europe has been blamed largely on the decline in human hunters and bountiful food in the form of maize and other crops. With their undiscerning diet, their large litters and their sheer adaptability, wild boar are evolved to catapult themselves towards the slightest opportunity.
The return of the boar, some released deliberately by animal liberation campaigners, others released by hunters and still more escaping from domestic confines, has led to an interest in their role within the wider ecology, and a discussion about their potential as part of wider rewilding efforts. Rewilding is often simply understood as the release of animals and plants into areas that have been denuded by human induced change. A return to a past nature. It is, in my opinion, a environmental that is much more complex - not least because it rewilding enthusiasts often hope for a return to an imaginary past, neglecting to understand the role of human influence on nature. As I noted in my recent review of Sophie Yeo's recent book Nature's Ghosts, there is no natural world. Rewilding must take account of the complex interactions between animals, environment and humans.
Lyons' book supports this. She explores the way that boar change the environment, shaping aspects of the Forest of Dean, digging, turning and breaking ground in ways that have important impacts on flora and fauna. These are fascinating chapters, exploring as they do the way that boar fit into an ecosystem, changing it and being changed by it in turn. The experience of boar in the Forest of Dean is, Lyons says, the "biggest unintentional field experiment in Britain’s nascent rewilding history."
Wherever boar root through the earth, we’re told, we’ll see volcanic eruptions of green growth, and all manner of other life will swarm and flock. Which does happen. Sometimes... But while the time that the boar has been gone is, in ecological terms, just an eye-blink, we have still forced much change on our landscapes in the interim. We can’t be certain of what would happen if boar were allowed to return to the entire country and in significant numbers.
But Lyons' book is perhaps most remarkable in her study of the effect of boar on humans. Some people living in areas where the boar have returned are excited; celebrating them, enjoying them, photographing and sharing their pictures. Others are scared and threatened. Lyons is certainly in the first category. Her excitement for these giant creatures shines through the pages, and we're drawn into her adventures. But Lyons is not the sort of author who only looks for positive reinforcement for her own opinions. She travels with people who hunt the boar, trying to understand their perspective, and finding some real insights. She also talks to those terrified of the animals.
Some of them are fearful for their personal safety, though there are scarce any examples of injury from boar in Britain. Some fearful for their animals, or personal property, though again few examples. Some are caught up in tabloid fearmongering, or simply don't like the animals.
Boar might number a few thousand in Britain. But there are an estimated ten million across mainland Europe and this makes for an interesting comparison. Why are the experiences and attitude to boar to wildly (!) different in Britain and Europe?
Here Lyons examines the different approaches to nature. One expert in the Spanish state, hired to monitor the boar living in the rural-urban interfaces in Barcelona argues that ‘The wild boar is not a problem... The problem is caused by people’s lack of experience with wildlife.’ It is certainly a good point. The fear of the unknown, hyped up by click-bait newspaper headline writers, is certainly a factor. But perhaps more deeply Lyons argues that the way that nature is approach in Britain arises out of a particular separation between nature and human. As Lyons says:
I fear that the sole use of farmed animals is helping to reinforce the mindset that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are, and should always be, separate realms. We have erected fences and other hard barriers to keep nature (including people) in or out. Yet so many wild lives depend on the ability to move through landscapes, to take part in ecological cycles of disturbance, rest and renewal. We’ve forgotten this. And just as we deny the movement of individual animals and of species by creating artificial boundaries, so we deny ourselves permission to belong to the rest of the world. We absorb our fences into our minds.
Maybe that’s a core part of why rewilding raises hackles. If your thoughts are constructed using the nature versus human binary, then rewilding can only mean wildlife, and never wildlife and people.
This I think is a particular problem in Britain. While it isn't restricted to Britain, there has been a particularly intense experiment with neoliberal nature by successive governments in the UK that has placed prices on nature and commodified the landscape. Lyons quotes Virginia Thomas of the University of Exeter who says "rewilding in England has itself been domesticated; it sacrifices some of its ambitions for ecological restoration in order to retain more human control."
Rewilding has become trapped by an approach to nature marked by the idea that prioritising capital accumulation is the only way for society to function. Nature is simply another aspect to this. This is not to say that neoliberalism hasn't also affected France, Spain or Italy. But to argue that so called Natural Capital approaches haven't gone as far. That won't last.
Thus the rewilding conundrum cannot be answered simply. It is not enough, as Lyons book explains, to simply restore an individual animal or plant to an area. Boar on their own won't halt Britain's biodiversity crisis. On the other-hand, rewilding as an approach that ignores humanity and our own position within ecological systems, is also doomed. The people who quietly shoot boar, or try to restrict them to certain fields and woodlands, are making the same mistake from the other direction.
The only solution can be a transformative approach to humanity's relationship to nature, one that recognises the complexity of nature's interactions and the place of boar (or beaver or any other animal) within that. And whose introduction involves a transformation of our own understanding of nature as well as our understanding of particular species. Such a revolutionary rewilding would be something else indeed.
Groundbreakers reminds us of what we stand to lose. Its not simply that we might not see boar, and their litters, living in the Forest of Dean, but that we might lose it all. Chantal Lyons' celebration of boar, and her thoughts on the meaning of rewilding make for a lovely and stimulating read. As such Groundbreakers is a book for our times.
Related Reviews
Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Rawlence - The Treeline: The last forest and the future of life on earth
Shrubsole - Who Owns England?
Yeo - Nature's Ghosts: The world we lost and how to bring it back
Pearce - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were
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