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One can visit many places in rural Britain and look out at a landscape of scrub and grass-covered rolling hills dotted with sheep with rugged, wet and windswept mountains in the background. At the summit of many of these mountains one can stare out over a landscape devoid of trees and relish in the rugged scenery. That is if the rain and wind relent enough to let you snap a quick picture.
This is the view I have experienced myself multiple times when hiking around the Lake District, Eryri or many of our glorious National Parks. I did not appreciate just how tree-less these landscapes are and nor how tree-covered they should be. It seems logical that in such a tough, windswept and wet place that only low-lying grass and shrubs should survive.
I was not the only one. In the first line of his book, Guy Shrubsole admits that he didn’t believe that Britain was a rainforest nation. It’s easy to see why. As he explains, Britain has become a nation without its trees, just 13% of our nation is covered in forest and large portions of this come from conifer plantations. And whilst the loss of any woodland habitat is a shame, Britain is home to a globally rare habitat, temperate rainforest.
This is the focus of this wonderful book, the 2022 Sunday Times Science Book of the Year. Shrubsole leads us on quest to learn more about this special habitat, its history and association with Britain and how only 1% of this habitat clings on in narrow, insecure places. Most importantly, we discover how vital Britain is in bringing this habitat back from the brink and what people are already doing to spur on its revival.
Throughout this book, Shrubsole weaves a tale for us as mystical and magical as the myths and legends that have arisen from our lost rainforests. He delights in sharing his discoveries of how he stumbled upon the stories and tales that these habitats have inspired. It is not just our trees we have lost in this process, it is a part of the culture of Britain that has disappeared as well. Many of our legends and myths come from such places. Merlin, King Arthur and the Mabinogion are inspired by temperate rainforest. Even contemporary works such as Fangorn Forest from Lord of the Rings resembles temperate rainforest. The wisht hounds of Wistman’s Wood are said to inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes novel, the Hound of the Baskervilles.
The beauty of this book is not only that Shrubsole brings us along in these tales of discovery as he shares his joyous journeys initially across Dartmoor, and then the rest of the country in search of these hidden treasures and how Britain lost its beloved rainforests, he also shows us the path ahead and how Britain can regain its lost habitat. Using case studies and contemporary examples, he highlights the people and organisations already fighting to preserve what already hangs on and expanding such areas. My next hike across a National Park will be to find one of these lost rainforests.
Daniel George, CEnv, MISEP: I’m a senior sustainability and carbon consultant for AtkinsRéalis, based in their Bristol office. I’m a big reader of sci-fi and climate fiction but I’ll happy read anything. I love climate fiction because it provides a counter to the constant doom and gloom of climate change that we normally experience. Whilst climate fiction is rarely sunshine and rainbows, it does often provide a more positive future outlook than the news or social media. It explores people dealing with the challenges of a climate-damaged world and showcases their stories of adaptation, community and humanity in such vividly imaginative ways.
