So I ended up purchasing this book, as it reflected the idea presented within my dissertation very well. They gave further research into rainforests within Britain that I had no idea existed. I wanted to use this book as a bible or a guide to research these forests but I found even more exciting information. The concept of ghost woods, or searching for ghosts within these environments that once existed and still hold on for dear life. How can field recording preservation within an artistic context occur as a reflection within my portfolio work, and can these pieces of work position the listener to feel more inclined to love and save our ecological planet? Here are some quotes.
A temperate rainforest is a wood where it’s wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1 per cent of the world’s surface.
I think it’s good to define what a temperate rainforest is, in contrast to a tropical rainforest and that they only cover 1% of the world’s surface, even more rare than a tropical rainforest!
Britain’s rainforests, in short, are truly the pinnacle of our country’s woodlands. Not only are they extraoridinary places to experience, providing a fest for the senes. They’re also treasure-troves of biodiversity, home to globally significant populations of rare species of lichens and mosses, birds and mammals. And the carbon that our rainforest trees are busily soaking up — not just in their trunks, but also via the epiphytic plants that festoon their branches — make them some of our best allies in the fight against the climate crisis.
I think people often forget that nature and ecological sites like these rainforests are actually a helping hand against climate change that we face, and they soak up massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even at 1% coverage of the world they still go a long way to help our planet stay at its correct temperature.
Between the first earth day of 1970 and the rio earth summit of 1992, millions of people across the world rose up to demand action against air and water pollution, environmental destruction and the despoliation of the natural world.
I read about this during my dissertation research. Earth Day and the moon landing created this unified feeling within planet Earth Showing us for the first time all together. I think this contrasts the same argument towards the natural world that we exist with.
The first modern ‘tree huggers’ were the Chipko women of Uttar Pradesh in India, who chained themselves to trees to stop them being cut down.
I think it’s interesting to see this within the context of Western-sided research but in fact, the first tree huggers were the Chipko women of India!
This loss of cultural memo, this great forgetting that we once had rainforests, is almost as heartbreaking as the loss of the forests themselves, It points to the phenomenon that ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: society’s ability to grow accustomed to environmental losses.
I didn’t realise that not only did we lose the forests in Britain but we also forgot. Which is even more important. How can our society forget they existed and dominated Britain at one point?
Britain’s rainforests remain under-recognised, unmapped, and largely unacknowledged by politicians and a wider public.
Something is also discovered while reading this book, it’s difficult to locate these forests and find them. I’m optimistic I can find out despite the rain that falls there.
The ecologist Ian Rotherham has joined the term ‘ghost woods’ to describe the landscape emptied of trees. As we now know, after the last Ice Age, Britain was far more wooded than the pitiful 13 per cent woodland cover we have today.
Ghost woods as a landscape emptied of trees is a super interesting concept to me. The idea is that they are still there the spirits of the trees, and that you can tell by the landscape that they existed.
Fowles wrote in an essay about Wistman’s wood, ‘thermal black hound is the Moor itself – that is, untamed nature, the inhuman hostility at the heart of such landscapes. But there is also something else haunting about Wistman’s wood and the barren moor that surrounds it – a nightmare that stalks the twenty-first century imagination far more than tales of ghost hounds and bogeymen. It is the spectre of ecological collapse. Forget the ghost stories: the real ghosts in Dartmoor’s landscape are the ones rising from the bones of the rainforests that we destroyed.
Ecological collapse is the real ghost that haunts Wistmans woods. How can we protect and understand these places on the edge of an ecological collapse?
But Rotherham’s search for ghost woods isn’t intended merely to mourn what’s departed, rather to resurrect what still survives
I think this is a key idea here, the ghosts are not what has gone but also what remains, what remains shows us what was there which is important.
If we have no love for nature, it seems unlikely that we’ll protect it. And without experiencing nature, regularly and close up, it’s hard to see how that love can be cultivated.
Very similar to what Gordon Hempton writes about that in order to save the planet we must make the population fall back in love with planet Earth.
How do we get people interested in rainforest plants, many of which are seldom seen by the general public? And, having got the public interested, how do we prevent people from loving our rainforests to death?
This contrast that falling in love with our forests like the Victorians did, which killed our fern population and also protected it, is a fine line. With more exposure comes more potential foot traffic and damage in these forests.
When you visit one of Britain’s magnificent rainforests, remember the essence of the Countryside code: take only photographs, leave only footprints.
Something I will follow when I take a trip to see them.
I also noted a few forest names within this book to think about the trip I want to take, to visit Wistmans wood.
RAINFORESTS:
Holn Chase 46
Wiseman’s Wood
The gizzard
Young Wood Lake District
Black tor beare
I also saw a map with a guide online on his website. I think the next steps are to continue research and also do experiments in other natural ecological sites before taking this big trip, perhaps they can all intertwine?