The lost rainforests… of Britain?

A Book by Guy Shrubsole and an issue for many

Rainforests? In Britain? Reaching trunks creaking with time and living haloes of epiphytic plants growing from their boughs. The ripe soil blossoming forth an abundance of life and a velvet skin of rain that shelters every surface. Another endangered habitat with a biodiversity crisis… Just sounds like a way to make English people feel more important and special. Turns out, there are such things as temperate rainforests and the U.K. has done a fantastic job of wiping them out.

A rainforest is distinct from other forests – not just because of the sheer amount of rainfall it encounters but also – because of the ability of plants to grow on the trees in a symbiotic relationship. The indicator in Britain’s rainforest are types of lichen that grow alongside algae and fungus, feeding and fuelling each other with photosynthesis and decay so that soil is not necessary. They live simply as a throuple in the arial limbs of ancient trees.

Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforest’s of Britain provided readers with intricate details of these small-scale plants that have huge impacts. It raises the point that the Britain harps endlessly on about other countries needing to protect the world’s biodiversity and putting responsibility solely on the shoulders of others when our rainforest’s have suffered from agricultural extinction.

Invasive species like sheep, deer, coniferous trees and humans(jk about that last one but only just) have been brought into parts of the U.K. and cause damage that is difficult to just grow back. Sheep who are free to roam (unlike many humans across the moors!) nibble at fresh saplings of trees that yearn to grow and spread back out. The antidote to this? According to Shrubsole, this could include returning more predators into the wild – such as pine martens, wolves and eagles. But what would happen to the poor sheep of Britain’s farmers? Other species such as bison have already been reintroduced to balance the dairy cow population and dam-building beavers too as part of rewilding projects.

I used to think that when we would eventually be wiped out by ‘natural’ disasters caused by our own human foolishness that the world would return to its former glory but now I worry that we have had such an intense impact on our landscape that the sheep will continue munching along and making it impossible for anything to thrive. Pigs on the other hand? Some other countries consider boars to be pests on their arable land, burrowing through the soil. But for a rainforest, desperately trying to grow, this freshly churned earth is an idyll. Bring back the wild boars of Britain’s past that have been hopelessly hunted into extinction instead of these poor pigs bred in captivity for food, you say?

Forests are already excellent removers of carbon from the atmosphere, keeping it secure in their trunks and the soil. Rainforests, however, are capable of doing this high in the sky as well with the glowing ecosystems that perch there, vibing with each other and having crucial ecological importance.