On a personal note, having a strange man rubbing your back always feels a bit odd but I could hardly walk yesterday afternoon and now, although I am not, in the words of Van Morrison, 'Laughing and a running hey, hey Skipping and a jumping', I am able to blog and respond to comments!
Yesterday the Guardian posted our comment piece on the real battle for our forests. It is based on an earlier blog from here so won't surprise readers of this blog but it brings our thoughts, or some of them, to a wider audience. And there were, yesterday when I looked, about 120 comments on it - which are also worth looking at.
What is this battle about? Is it about stopping the Forest of Dean being chopped down? - no, as it never would have been. Is it about saving our ancient forests? - partly. Is it about saving the Forestry Commission? - it is for some people. Is it about maintaining public access to, and biodiversity in, existing forests? - yes partly. Is it about giving the Government a bloody nose? - yes, for some people. Is it about maintaining and enhancing wildlife on state-managed land? - yes, partly. Is it about the Public Bodies Bill? - partly, but that is a much bigger issue which transcends forest. Is it about NGOs wanting to get their hands on lots of land? - maybe, but not as far as the RSPB is concerned. Is it about Big Society and how it might or might not work? - yes, it's a case study. Is it about us, the nation, owning land? - yes, partly. Is it about NNRs as well as forests, and about heathlands as well as woods? - yes, I think it is.
It's also about how public spending cuts affect nature - which we did make quite an issue in the run-up to the CSR in October. Things might have been even worse were it not for those hundreds of thousands of voices mobilised by the RSPB - your voices in Letter to the Future.
It's about lots of things. And some of them are painted in shades of grey.
PS Note added later. I see the Daily Telegraph has a piece on our and the Wildlife Trusts' worries about heathlands too.
Trimbush,
There is no need to bring party politics into this. The argument that the forests have to be sold off because Labour has spent all the money doesn't really hold water, since the sums involved are trivial compared to the massive size of the overall national debt / deficit. Labour may well have spent all the money, but it's not really relevant to this issue.
The majority view in this country is that people do want the government to continue owning and managing woodland, in the belief that the government can do a better job of providing the kind of public benefits such as wildlife conservation and access for recreation than the private sector can. I don't think many people would argue that the Forestry Commission is doing a perfect job in this area, but the alternative may well be worse.
I agree that the state should not be in the business of managing forests solely for timber production, just as it should not be involved in e.g. commercial wheat growing, but the point is that even the more production-oriented forests do have multiple uses and they should be managed accordingly. Passing control of such forests to profit-oriented private forestry companies may well increase productivity, but at the expense of non-monetised public benefits.
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Regarding the Forest of Dean, as mentioned in Mark's Guardian article, substantial portions of this do consist of conifer plantations which would be much better converted to native broadleaf woodland.
While Mark rightly brings up the issue of plantation restoration to heathland, I find it ironic that the one habitat which never gets mentioned in this context is genuine wild native forest i.e. without tree felling / coppicing etc. Visit just about any 'ancient woodland' and you find that, while the site may be ancient, the trees themselves are not. Equally lacking are the important natural features such as (very) large quantities of dead wood, the diverse associated communities of insects/fungi/birds, and the shade/humidity-dependent plant communities. The conservation community as a whole has really fallen down on this issue, preferring instead to focus on 'semi-natural' man-made habitats such as coppice woodland, heathland, chalk grassland etc. Not that these habitats aren't important, but there needs to be a rebalancing of attention.