On Wednesday, the Independent Panel on Forestry publishes their much anticipated report. Established after the public uproar over government plans to review the Forestry Commission and the public forest estate, the Panel's job is to map out a future for both England's public and private forests. This feels like a good enough reason to dedicate this week's blogs to our fabulous forests.
The public uproar in early 2011 was a wake-up call for politicians. It surfaced the deep, spiritual attachment that we, as a nation, have for our wild wooded landscapes. To be honest, it also took took many within NGOs by surprise. Not seen since the road protests of the 1990s had there been such public display of anger and passion about protection of the natural world in England.
Our forests are where many of us go to relax, be inspired and recover from the horrors of the real world. And they just happen to be home to some wonderful wildlife - wildlife which (as I shall write tomorrow) is in trouble. As Robert MacFarlane writes in The Wild Places,
"There is no mystery in this association of wood and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked in woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of colour, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the delotoid form of the streambed into whichit has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their colour rhyme in the eye-ring of a blackbrid. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories of forests. different times and wolds can be joined.
Woods and forests have been essential to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is no only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought. Woods, like other wild places, can kindle new ways of being or cognition in people can urge their minds differently."
Much is expected from the Forest Panel's report and the RSPB's ambitions are outlined here. I shall let you know what we make of it on Wednesday.
Until then, have a good week and if you can, take time out to go for a walk in the woods.
I hope not but i'm still expecting bad news.
Just off out to have a walk in my local woods.