Robin Page writes, or rants, about forests, grey squirrels and conservation charities in the Mail on Sunday. As usual with Robin, everybody is doing everything wrong in a rather unspecified and vague way - but he's very cross about it.
For a more thoughtful piece, which you won't find on line, try the Sunday Express and Stuart Winter's regular Birdman column. Stuart is right to point out that our woodland wildlife is not in great shape - he knows his stuff. He likes our idea of a Forest and Wildlife Service - of which more tomorrow - and seems to think that Caroline Spelman has wildlife's interests at heart.
The Sunday Times (remember you have to pay to see this) seems to think that red squirrels care who owns the woods they live in. Since their main threat is from the non-native grey squirrel, which carries a disease to which red squirrels are particularly susceptible, it isn't immediately clear to me why red squirrels are signing up to keeping all forests in state ownership. And, of course, red squirrels have declined in numbers and range throughout the period since 1919 when the Forestry Commission was created. It would be a bit tricky to say that our squirrels are safe in FC's hands. Although if they had been a Forest and Wildlife Service rather than a state timber company then maybe things would have been better. Just maybe.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Very funny Mark,don,t think I will upset you this week.
Forestry Outlaw - welcome to the RSPB Community and to this blog. Everyone deserves a say and your comment has some interesting bits to it. I try to give everyone a pretty easy welcoming time on their first comment here - and that's what I'll do with you too. I can't agree with your view of the past, present or future - but apart from that it's perfect.
Poor old RSPB. Caught with your fingers in the till, with the Woodland Trust and Wildlife Trust, by Jonathan Porritt for trying to stitch up the Forestry Commission behind the scenes with Defra officials, Spelman and Paice. And now its in the public. Mark must have been very busy this week pressing the flesh with the Sunday papers, with the guy's from Sandy looking for a Plan B.
Now, that the public have roared and your have been wrong footed (no doubt embarrassing the ministers after you gave your backing for this sorry mess) your now proposing a Forest and Wildlife Service. So lets guess, along with the usual suspects your be wanting a key place at the steering group (as a exemplar deliver at the landscape scale, despite the evidence) with Defra to 'advise' the new organisation.
So chop, chop, chop to those 'alien' and nasty conifers on heathland and no doubt there will be help for your friends in the Woodland Trust on Ancient Woodlands. Joy be abound and you have finally got those nasty foresters to see sense, especially as they have been replaced by more sensitive types.
Buts that's less carbon stored, less employment and less timber. Climat change now worstens and less people are in rural areas. No doubt less recreation to stop troubling the three lucky birds on heaths and less biodiveristy, for those species not lucky enough to be on you wish list (poor Sand Lizards, Toads and Froggy, shame they did not evolve wings!).
For example the heathland's will cost the public a small fortune (as they do now thank to HLS) to run and provide less Ecosystem Services than the woodlands, but the RSPB will advise that only a heather dominant landscape is the best and only solution is this outdated landuse. The three lucky birds will cheep, but sadly they will also retreat as they preferred the pine plantations and clearfells that provided the most resilient sites. The forestry sector will enter a new dark age, shaped largely by bully and rich environmental NGO's. As they are eclipsed, and active management becomes an unpleasant memory, biodiversity will reduce as rides become over ground and dark, trees collapse and degrade and the only disturbance is an volunteer pointlessly try to coppice a small copses of 'native' broadleaves.
So when will there be an a Bill in parliament to moderate the control the environmental NGO's so that they work for the national interest, rather than a few individuals whims? Please note their are 59 million people not voicing your sort of nature.
I'm afraid that for the government it's just an ideological thing - they want a smaller state. Rather than try to press on regardless with the Big Society idea it's surely time for David Cameron to "drop the dead donkey".
Mark - as ever in all this there's more thorough coverage in the Sunday Telegraph - and also the Observer where Andrew Rawnsley marvels at how a third order issue (and he's right, it is) can have become a defining symbol of the current Government's worst traits.
But its the Telegraph which with an RSPB style map of MPs, majorities and forests charts the full and extraordinary polictical cost of this whole disastrous exercise. I agree with Stuart Winter - and you've reported on Nagoya and the Oxford Farmers Conference - that Mrs Spelman is both impressive and comes across as having a grasp of the big issues & a real view to the future. On all except one issue - and I still ask myself how she got into it, and how she dug such a whole - forests sales. Compared to rainforest destruction, climate change and biodiversity they are a trivial waste of everyone's time. How on earth has she allowed them to become the defining issue of her time as Secretary of State and why has David Cameron put his weight behind the Government's proposals when more and more people must be wondering exactly who is behind all this and concluding its exactly the very rich, out of touch minority Cameron has to distance himself from to have any credibility with most voters.
I remain bemused - but the future is easier: this shouldn't fester, our National Forests (and Nature Reserves) do matter and we do need change - so this is the right time to look seek the future that everyone can support and I hope the Government has the guts and vision to do a real U turn and get alongside what communities and individuals have told them so clearly they want.