I don't always agree with Charles Clover but he is always worth reading. Last weekend he was arguing that there is a lot of unfinished business with forestry - a line not that dissimilar from our own in the RSPB. And although Charles's article in the Sunday Times is pretty robustly written our view is simply that this is an opportunity for further improvement in how our forests and other land are managed by the FC. It seems as though Jonathon Porritt is catching up with this view too in an article also hidden behind Rupert Murdoch's pay-wall in The Times. The Guardian also had another think about the issue. Government would be wrong if they thought that this issue will simply melt away like a Sitka spruce in the fog.
And our joint proposal with other NGOs and buiness for a UK peat levy was picked up in the Irish Times as well as the Telegraph, BBC online and Daily Express.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
I very much agree that the last thing we need is to leave forestry as unfinished business - much though the Government might like to kick what has been a disaster for them way into touch.
As you've said all along, Mark, the Forestry Commission needs a remit not just for the future but even for what it is now: the whole debate has been bedevilled by the preception that FC is no more than a failed timber business - which is plain wrong and the public have shown that they know it.
Part of the problem has been people like Charles Clover and Sir Simon Jenkins of the National Trust commentating on the basis of the FC of 20 or 30 years ago - I would say to them before you say any more get up to date with what FC is doing today then you might understand why to the people who actually know and use England's National Forests today's FC is miles away from being a 'Stalinist Organisation'.
The huge gap up till now is that FC has had no voice - if it had it would have been able to point out that far from going too slowly on restoring ancient woodlands it has listened to bodies like the Woodland Trust (one wonders where the criticism came from as WT seem to be the Government's main source on ancient woodland ?) which supported gradual restoration to avoid further damage during restoration- and if anything has criticised FC for going too fast in the south east in particular - a view very different from that of RSPB's close partner Butterfly Conservation which this month celebrates the achievement of both RSPB and FC in a huge reversal of fortunes for some of our most frafgile butterflies thanks to the superb SE England woodland Butterfly project recently completed.