Invisible foes Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease, Mark Harrison (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT; 2013), ISBN: 978-0-300-12357-9

How wild is wildlife? Underneath the debates pitching cat lobbyists against bird lovers and badger defenders against cattle farmers lurks another deeper question, namely what wildlife or wild nature should look like. One might argue that birds coming into our gardens to be fed and badgers well-protected in managed park landscapes have little to do with nature or wilderness. From these considerations there regularly sprouts the suggestion for re-wilding landscapes by reducing the amount of human intervention and reintroducing species wiped out by habitat loss or hunting. Most recently, UK environmentalist and author George Monbiot dedicated his new book to this idea (Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding). Monbiot writes: “Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species, but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.” Monbiot criticises the EU farming subsidies, which require owners to keep their land in “agricultural condition” even if it is no longer economically viable to actually farm it. By removing this condition and instead capping the total subsidies paid to each landowner, he says, the EU could stop forcing farmers to destroy wildlife and open up opportunities for rewilding. On the other hand one might argue that after millennia of ever-accelerating anthropogenic transformation of our planet, pristine nature no longer exists. Even the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, and as a result the global climate, is now shaped by the ever-growing footprint of our species. The best we might achieve is to manage our activities and our domesticated companions sustainably and to minimise the collateral damage we (and our cats and cattle) are inflicting on what remains of the natural environment.