Guy Shrubsole’s enchanting and insightful new book shows Britain was once a land of rainforests and charts his interest and his attempts to map and preserve them
Review by Shafik Meghji
Last year, a Natural History Museum study found that the UK is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. A major cause of this has been deforestation: only 13 per cent of the UK is covered by trees, less than almost every other country in Europe. But as writer and campaigner Guy Shrubsole’s enchanting and insightful new book shows, this wasn’t always the case – as unlikely as it may sound, we were was once a land of rainforests.
After the last Ice Age, temperate rainforests – rarer than their tropical counterparts but similarly bursting with life – spread across as much as a fifth of Britain. Today, they survive only in isolated patches, predominantly along the west coast of Scotland, the Lake District, the Pennines, west Wales, Devon and Cornwall. Few people are aware of our rainforest heritage, but they’ve left a deep cultural imprint, shaping many of our national myths and legends – notably the Welsh book of fables The Mabinogion – and inspiring the likes of Wordsworth, Conan Doyle and Tolkien.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain charts Shrubsole’s growing fascination with these remarkable biomes and his attempts to map and preserve them. His descriptions are wonderfully evocative – ‘moss forests in miniature carpeting branches’; ‘coral reefs of lichens suspended in the canopies’ – and his enthusiasm for species such as tree lungwort, a rare lichen whose ‘blistered surface and apparent air-chambers bring to mind the inside of a lung’ is infectious. Shrubsole also highlights the vital role our rainforests can play in helping to address the climate and biodiversity crises, as well as the threats they face, which include overgrazing by sheep, plantation forestry, habitat fragmentation and, predominantly in Scotland, ‘the twin menaces of deer and rhododendron’.
The book’s latter sections explore how we can protect, restore and expand these forests. Shrubsole has launched a campaign to urge the UK government to develop a rainforest strategy, arguing that it’s hypocritical to expect countries such as Brazil and Indonesia to protect their rainforests if we aren’t prepared to do the same for our own: ‘We can’t simply place all of the burden of reversing biodiversity loss on the developing world.’
