Rebuilding a forest: How humans lost touch with woodlands – and how we’re restoring the connection

Wood has shaped the whole of human history – from using it to create fire to, later, building ships and cathedrals.

Many of our houses, furniture, and crafts such as musical instruments remain dependent on wood. Carpentry is recognised as one of the oldest occupations of our species, and it is still going strong.

But the rise of homo sapiens has also spelt disaster for our planet’s forests, which are becoming dangerously depleted as alongside demand for wood, demand for land – primarily for farming – continues to take a catastrophic toll on woodlands.

We remain hugely dependent on the availability of wood as a construction and manufacturing material, but we are also beginning to understand that the loss of forests and woodlands goes far beyond just this resource – from absorbing and storing rising levels of atmospheric carbon to supporting rich ecosystems, and even helping humans’ mental health.

We are cutting down trees faster than ever before. Since 1940 we have been removing 45,000 square miles of tropical rainforest a year.

The world’s “forest maximum” was reached around 5,000-6,000 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age, but before humans really began to swing their axes in earnest.

In the UK, pollen analysis cited by Roland Ennos in his 2021 book The Wood Age shows that tree cover fell from a maximum of around 80 per cent of all land to just 10 per cent by the time of the Doomsday Book in 1086, and down to just seven per cent by the beginning of the 14th century.

By the time of the industrial revolution and the resultant urbanisation of populations, humans had already begun to cut themselves off from our species-long relationship with the natural world and the trees in remaining forested areas.

But we now know that we are doing ourselves a huge disservice: there is a wealth of scientific evidence showing that merely visiting a forest can improve your mood, your attention span, and improve your psychological state. Walking among trees is proven to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol while improving mood and lowering levels of anxiety.

The magnitude of what we have lost is difficult to fathom. The UK is now one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries.

As we lost our trees we also lost many of the species which lived among them. Lynx, wolves, beavers, wild cattle, bears, red squirrels and pine martens are all among the species which lived across the UK, but hunting and habitat loss have driven them either to extinction or close to it.

Tiny pockets of the arboreal abundance which once existed are now found in isolated corners of the country.

“Once upon a time there was a much greater expanse of forest that covered Britain and it’s often referred to as the ‘wildwood’,” Guy Shrubsole, author of the forthcoming book The Lost Rainforests of Britain, tells The Independent.

“There is still a bit of a debate about exactly how dense this wildwood was – whether it was a closed-canopy woodland over which a squirrel could leap from branch to branch from Land’s End to John O’Groats as the old adage has it, or whether it was more of a mosaic of open glades with a savannah landscape.”

But he says research increasingly supports a fairly densely forested landscape overall.

“With the retreat of the ice at the end of the last Ice Age, we’re talking about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. There was then an advance of different species of trees as the ice retreated and the tundra, montane and alpine conditions lessened and the climate warmed.

“Waves of different tree species dominated in certain places and certain times – birch is often an early coloniser, hazel was a particular very ancient coloniser. There were all these interesting different eras of different compositions of the wood. We think of there being two main sorts of woods, broad-leafed and coniferous, and that’s not quite the case. It’s a much more detailed pallet than that.”

As well as the vast broad-leaf forests which covered much of the land, the UK had a thriving temperate rainforest ecosystem making up a significant part of the west coast.

During the forest maximum, “we most likely had temperate rainforest covering about 20 per cent of Britain – in the wettest bits of western Britain,” Shrubsole says.

There is less than one per cent of these rainforests left today, affording us only the tiniest glimpse at the astonishing ecosystems which would have once flourished.

Temperate rainforests are globally rare and more threatened than tropical rainforests. They differ from drier woodlands in that they have a high level of humidity maintained both by local conditions – in particular the influence of the sea – but also by the forest itself which traps moisture and therefore allows an enormous profusion of plants to grow.

Particularly notable is the high level of epiphytes – plants which grow on other plants.

“They’re not parasitic, they’re simply using the trees as scaffolding,” says Shrubsole. “They get enough of their nutrients and moisture from being on the tree rather than having to anchor their roots into the ground.”

Common epiphytes include lichens, liverworts, mosses and ferns, and as well as living on the trees all the way up to the canopy, many of them also cover rocks, fallen wood and other parts of the forest, meaning that the whole ecosystem is adorned with life all year round.

“You actually get a build-up of soil in the forest canopy, because you have things like mosses living and dying up on the branches which creates a kind of humus in which other plants can anchor themselves,” says Shrubsole.

Aidan Maccormick, Northwoods’ rewilding officer at Scotland: The Big Picture, and an expert in temperate rainforests, tells The Independent: “Stepping into one of the few remaining fragments of temperate rainforest in Britain is a calming yet exhilarating experience. It’s a dense green world of ferns, mosses and lichens covering everything from the ground to the canopy of twisted oaks.

“The sound of water is often nearby and combined with the soft green light and sweet smell of vegetation, it creates a surreal, multisensory landscape that everyone should experience at least once.”

The Mabinogion, a collection of 11 prose stories collated from medieval Welsh manuscripts which were originally part of the oral tradition of bards in Wales, were even arranged in so-called “branches”, with the stories making up constituent parts of a tree.

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“Gwydion, the trickster wizard, his name means ‘born of trees’,” says Shrubsole. “He takes the flowers of the oak and the flowers of broom and meadowsweet and he makes them into Blodeuwedd, the woman made out of flowers.

“In another tale, called ‘The Battle of the Trees’, Gwydion animates an entire forest – this is a couple of thousand years before Tolkien wrote about the ents,” Shrubsole says.

These ancient narratives offer us a vital window into our past relationship with forests.

As efforts to bring back some of what has been lost have increased, so too has pushback from those seeking to preserve more recent historical relationships with the emptier landscapes.

The rise in deer stalking and driven grouse shooting during the Victorian era has left a powerful legacy, with many organisations devoted to maintaining forest-free hillsides covered in heather on which grouse thrive, or the close-cropped grasslands stripped of saplings in hillsides overrun with deer.

Every year people pay to shoot grouse and deer, but the ecological burden of allowing these artificially created landscapes to persist is becoming increasingly well-documented and a backlash is growing.

“A lot of people who say we shouldn’t have rewilding, or this kind of ecological restoration, are using the arguments of so-called ‘cultural landscapes’ in the Lake District or the Welsh hills, but it’s an incredibly ahistorical argument because – well, whose culture are we celebrating?” asks Shrubsole.

“Why are we preserving a particular denuded landscape formed by a particular culture in aspic, rather than looking at how past cultures lived, arguably, more in harmony with the Atlantic oak woods and temperate rainforests and other ancient woodlands?”

Furthermore, even when we do recognise and celebrate more ancient cultures, we don’t necessarily furnish our images of the past with the far higher levels of greenery which would have been present at the time.

“People here in Dartmoor are rightly excited by the Bronze Age hillforts, but there isn’t a sense that it would have been much more wooded in those days,” Shrubsole says.

“There would have been hazel and oak on the uplands of Dartmoor. That’s the environment this historic culture inhabited. They would have hunted wolves, deer and elk possibly – all these missing creatures which are now just ghosts in the landscape.”

While the scale of the loss of the natural world we are facing today is enormous, it is not insurmountable.

A huge array of rewilding efforts are under way across the country, with Rewilding Britain’s Richard Bunting telling The Independent that almost 900 projects now make up the organisation’s rewilding network.

Some of these include landscape-scale reforestation programmes such as in Carrifran, a 1,600-acre valley in the Moffat Hills in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, which has been transformed over the past 20 years through major tree-planting efforts.

Other major projects include Trees For Life’s effort to rebuild the Caledonian Forest which stretched across a huge swathe of Scotland.

Building on the tiny fragments of the original forest left untouched after centuries of farming, land clearances and felling for firewood and shipbuilding, the organisation has returned red squirrels to forests in the Northwest Highlands where the animal had not lived for over 50 years and it has sought to bring back beavers to rivers and lochs.

Charles Dundas, chief executive of the Borders Forest Trust, helps landowners rewild landscape-scale rewilding projects in Scotland, as well as helping owners of smaller plots of land grow and manage woodlands.

“Lobbying for trees is one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had,” he tells The Independent. “You’re pushing at an open door. Everyone, no matter what their age or political stripe, can all see the value in native conservation woodland.

“The difficulty comes once you are a landowner and looking for a financial return on your investment – or indeed, a government minister looking for something that can contribute to the GDP of the nation whilst also providing jobs and everything else.

“But in the environmental sector, I think we’re starting to get our act together to better enumerate what the economic and social benefits of conservation woodland and forestry can be.”

Previous rewilding efforts have shown the very real return on investment which can occur once tourists begin to arrive – for example, the return of wild white-tailed eagles to the Isle of Mull has rapidly brought enormous benefits to the island. The same can occur with rewilded land, Dundas says.

“The more beauteous landscape of a tree-covered landscape becomes a tangible benefit to the tourist amenity of an area. Plus, the fact that this new wooded landscape is going to be home to far more plants and animals as well. It all becomes a magnet not only for greater diversity but greater economic diversity as well.

Dundas describes the rewilding projects as a “sort of leap of faith”.

“People talk about ‘rewilding’ or creating ‘wildwoods’ or ‘wilderness’, yet we are doing it through the most intense human intervention possible by planting every tree that’s there. There is a school of thought which says that if you want to really rewild something then you have to completely leave it alone, but that’s going to take centuries. The tree seed source simply isn’t there as we live in such a degraded landscape.

“We’re creating the seed source that will allow these forests to become self-regulating within nature after a few centuries. As humanity, we have thrown the balance of nature completely out of whack. We should use the power we have as humanity to actually put our finger on the scales and try and push things back the other way.”

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Northwoods’ Aidan Maccormick says in recent years, books such as Isabella Tree’s Wilding – which tells the story of transforming a poorly performing Sussex farm into a renowned haven for wildlife, while also making more money than before – have been a key catalyst in driving interest in rewilding, both among landowners and those without large areas of their own land.

“There’s a growing demand among people with land to rewild, and at Northwoods we’re helping them. We help restore wetlands and grasslands, but restoration of woodlands is probably the most dominant feature for most of the people who want to carry out ecological restoration.

“People who own land want to do something different with it, and if you don’t own land, then as communities, people have been rewilding their school playgrounds, their parks, and there’s greater engagement in [doing it in] a different way than before. It’s very local, and it’s real. People can see the change and there’s a desire to be part of the change.”

Understanding of the natural processes required to achieve this ambition is also improving, he says.

“In the past, it was ‘plant as many trees as possible’ – now the understanding is a bit more nuanced. It’s getting away from carbon credits and as many stems as possible, to creating the actual woodlands we lost, which is not just the trees, but the diversity of species.”

While the same desire to protect the natural world and rebuild what we have lost has so far been a lightning rod that can unite conservationists, landowners, environmentalists, scientists, and swathes of the public, there is a strong sense that what has been achieved so far has been done in spite of government efforts.

New prime minister Liz Truss has faced criticism from numerous major conservation groups over plans to tear up existing environmental protections, boost damaging fossil fuel usage, and scrap key land management reforms.

“I find it absolutely astonishing that the government would seek to potentially junk all the reforms it had [planned],” says Shrubsole.

“There are loads of farmers out there who want something different, as well as campaigners and members of conservation groups. There’s a real outcry, and a real pushback, which I’m heartened by.”

“The government are going to lose,” he adds.

Bunting agrees. “Rewilders and conservationists and environmentalists and farmers – all people who love nature – are very worried about where we’re going.

“We’re seeing what looks like the biggest attack on nature that any of us have seen in our lifetimes through the threat to the environmental land management scheme [Elms] and the ripping up of environmental laws, and these ill-thought-through investment zones. It is hugely worrying. The government is seriously misjudging this. Electorally it’s bonkers.

“There’s pushback coming from all sorts of areas including charities who don’t speak out lightly – the National Trust and the RSPB.

“Rewilding is a narrative of hope, for tackling the climate crisis and generating benefits for people.”

Author Roland Ennos argues that the human story is one which should increasingly be viewed as inextricably bound to our relationship with wood.

The Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age each depended on, and served to bring us closer to, wood, he suggests.

As we face the existential threat presented by the worsening climate crisis, it could well be time for more of us to reinvigorate our interactions with forests and the wood in them, to help grow our woodlands, appreciate them, and boost our own wellbeing and that of our ailing planet.

Harry Cockburn is The Independent’s environment correspondent