Westonbirt Arboretum

Located approximately 3 miles (5 km) southwest of Tetbury, Gloucestershire, Westonbirt, The National Arboretum is a picturesque arboretum managed by Forestry England. It forms part of the Westonbirt House estate established during the height of Victorian plant hunting in the mid-19th century. The arboretum is listed as Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of special historic…

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Delamere Forest, Northwich, UK

when the British Empire's researchers realized that the cause of the ecological devastation was the British Empire:

much to consider.

on the motives and origins of some forms of imperial "environmentalism".

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Since the material resources of colonies were vital to the metropolitan centers of empire, some of the earliest conservation practices were established outside of Europe [but established for the purpose of protecting the natural resources desired by metropolitan Europe]. [...] [T]ropical island colonies were crucial laboratories of empire, as garden incubators for the transplantation of peoples [slaves, laborers] and plants [cash crops] and for generating the European revival of Edenic discourse. Eighteenth-century environmentalism derived from colonial island contexts in which limited space and an ideological model of utopia contributed to new models of conservation [...]. [T]ropical island colonies were at the vanguard of establishing forest reserves and environmental legislation [...]. These forest reserves, like those established in New England and South Africa, did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather a "more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing a new landscape by planting trees [in monoculture or otherwise modified plantations] [...]" [...].

Text by: Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. "Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth". Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by DeLoughrey and Handley. 2011.

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It is no accident that the earliest writers to comment specifically on rapid environmental change in the context of empires were scientists who were themselves often actors in the process of colonially stimulated environmental change. [...] As early as the mid-17th century [...] natural philosophers [...] in Bermuda, [...] in Barbados and [...] on St Helena [all British colonies] were all already well aware of characteristically high rates of soil erosion and deforestation in the colonial tropics [...]. On St Helena and Bermuda this early conservationism led, by 1715, to the gazetting of the first colonial forest reserves and forest protection laws. On French colonial Mauritius [...], Poivre and Philibert Commerson framed pioneering forest conservation [...] in the 1760s. In India William Roxburgh, Edward Balfour [...] ([...] Scottish medical scientists) wrote alarmist narratives relating deforestation to the danger of climate change. [...] East India Company scientists were also well aware of French experience in trying to prevent deforestation [...] [in] Mauritius. [...] Roxburgh [...] went on to further observe the incidence of global drought events which we know today were globally tele-connected El Nino events. [...] The writings of Edward Balfour and Hugh Cleghorn in the late 1840s in particular illustrate the extent of the permeation of a global environmental consciousness [...]. [T]he 1860s [were] a period which we could appropriately name the "first environmental decade", and which embodies a convergence of thinking about ecological change on a world scale [...]. It was in the particular circumstances of environmental change at the colonial periphery that what we would now term "environmentalism" first made itself felt [...]. Victorian texts such as [...] Ribbentrop's Forestry in the British Empire, Brown's Hydrology of South Africa, Cleghorn's Forests and Gardens of South India [...] were [...] vital to the onset of environmentalism [...]. One preoccupation stands out in them above all. This was a growing interest in the potential human impact on climate change [...] [and] global dessication. This fear grew steadily in the wake of colonial expansion [...]. Particularly after the 1860s, and even more after the great Indian famines of 1876 [...] these connections encouraged and stimulated the idea that human history and environmental change might be firmly linked.

Text by: Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran. "Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676-2000: Part I". Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 41, No. 41. 14 October 2006.

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Policing the interior [of British colonial land] following the Naning War gave Newbold the opportunity for exploring the people and landscape around Melaka […]. Newbold took his knowledge of the tropical environment in the Straits Settlements [British Malaya] to Madras [British India], where he earned a reputation as a naturalist and an Orientalist of some eminence. He was later elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Familiar with the barren landscape of the tin mines of Negeri Sembilan, Newbold made a seminal link between deforestation and the sand dune formations and siltation […]. The observation, published in 1839 […], alerted […] Balfour about the potential threat of erosion to local climate and agriculture. […] Logan brought his Peninsular experience [in the British colonies of Malaya] directly within the focus of the deforestation debate in India […]. His lecture to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1846 […] was hugely influential and put the Peninsula at the heart of the emerging discourse on tropical ecology. Penang, the perceived tropical paradise of abundance and stability, soon revealed its vulnerability to human [colonial] despoilment […].

Text by: Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells. "Peninsular Malaysia in the Context of Natural History and Colonial Science". New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11, 1. June 2009.

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British colonial forestry was arguably one of the most extensive imperial frameworks of scientific natural resource management anywhere [...]. [T]he roots of conservation [...] lay in the role played by scientific communities in the colonial periphery [...]. In India,[...] in 1805 [...] the court of directors of the East India Company sent a dispatch enquiring [...] [about] the Royal Navy [and its potential use of wood from Malabar's forests] [...]. This enquiry led to the appointment of a forest committee which reported that extensive deforestation had taken place and recommended the protection of the Malabar forests on grounds that they were valuable property. [...] [T]o step up the extraction of teak to augment the strength of the Royal Navy [...] [b]etween 1806 and 1823, the forests of Malabar were protected by means of this monopoly [...]. The history of British colonial forestry, however, took a decisive turn in the post-1860 period [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' and new agencies established. [...] The paradigm [...] was articulated explicitly in the first conference [Empire Forestry Conference] by R.S. Troup, a former Indian forest service officer and then the professor of forestry at Oxford. Troup began by sketching a linear model of the development of human relationship with forests, arguing that the human-forest interaction in civilized societies usually went through three distinct phases - destruction, conservation, and economic management. Conservation was a ‘wise and necessary measure’ but it was ‘only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire’. The ultimate ideal was economic management, [...] to exploit 'to the full [...]' and provide regular supplies [...] to industry.

Text by: Ravi Rajan. "Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of British Colonial Eco-Development, 1800-2000". Oxford Historical Monographs series, Oxford University Press. January 2006.

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The “planetary consciousness” produced by this systemizing of nature [during the rise of Linnaean taxonomy classification in eighteenth-century European science] […] increased the mobility of paradise discourse [...]. As European colonial expansion accelerated, the homogenizing transformation of people, economy and nature which it catalyzed also gave rise to a myth of lost paradise, which served as a register […] for obliterated cultures, peoples, and environments [devastated by that same European colonization], and as a measure of the rapid ecological changes, frequently deforestation and desiccation, generated by colonizing capital. On one hand, this myth served to suppress dissent by submerging it in melancholy, but on the other, it promoted the emergence of an imperialist environmental critique which would motivate the later establishment of colonial botanical gardens, potential Edens in which nature could be re-made. However, the subversive potential of the “green” critique voiced through the myth of endangered paradise was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods, thus continuing to serve the purposes of European capital.

Text by: Sharae Deckard. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. 2010.

Compared to ecologically and topographically similar regions of Europe or east Asia, the northeastern United States is unusually heavily forested. One might think "well, yeah, the U.S. hasn't been settled by agriculturalists for as long and is less densely populated, obviously there's going to be less percent land cleared for farms," but this is not so! Everywhere in the northeast, our forests rise from what were once old fields. In 1860, for instance, Maine was only 60% forested by land area. Today, that proportion is closer to 90%.

We owe our current landscape to two great waves (and several smaller ones) of farm abandonment. The first happened in the decades after the Civil War, when for various reasons* northeasterners (mostly from New England) packed up their pitchforks and decamped to the midwest. This had been going on before the war too, of course, but up until then it had not been in numbers enough that the northeastern farms stopped being worked. There was always a son or two left to till up more stones from the Vermont field. But that changed after the war, and the fields started to revert to oak and maple and pine. Indeed, much of the early formal scientific study of American forestry and ecology happened in these old Yankee fields and young Yankee forests, by outdoorsy young men from Harvard with names like a Lovecraft protagonist.

The second great wave was in the Great Depression and World War 2, when for various reasons** people from all the rougher sorts of terrain the east has to offer - from West Virginia to Indiana's Brown County to the Ozarks and back to the Catskills - left their farms to come down and seek work in the then-thriving industrial cities. Much of the hilly landscape of the east that had previously been dotted with small subsistence farms, full of exactly the barefoot gap-toothed hillbillies who captured the imagination of urban popular culture with their exotic poverty and folkways when they suddenly appeared in Cleveland, or wherever, in 1933.

These pulses of farm abandonment have left very specific patterns written in the ecologies of the northeast. For instance, the fact that the poor ridgetop farms that were once extremely common in Southern Ohio and Indiana were nearly all abandoned in the 1930s and '40s means that the forests that now grow there are uniformly approaching their first century (excepting, of course, where there's been logging in the meantime.) This is almost exactly long enough for the process of ecological succession to complete itself, and the forests to move into their mature phase.

And so you read books written in the '50s, '60s, or '70s about these areas, and you notice how common early successional species are, everywhere chokecherry and black birch. Whereas today the only evidence you may see of the forest's relative youthfulness is a few very large bigtooth aspens nearing the end of their lives, surrounded by tulip poplars and chestnut oaks that will endure for many years after all the aspens are dead.

*Young men returning from war with a restlessness and a desire to leave home again; those same young men posted far from home during the war and realizing just how awful the New England soil is, lmao; Republican government policy writtrn explicitly to favor small homesteaders heading west; the late 19thc. crash in agricultural prices (as, in a few short decades, the Great Plains, the Australian wheat belt, parts of the Kazakh and Siberian steppes, the plains of South Africa, and the Argentine pampas were all put under the plow for the first time, and during an era of global free trade) making many small farms entirely unsustainable.

**Years of erosion on fields carelessly laid out on steep terrain; the Great Depression making running a small farm, ah, difficult; economic modernisation making staying as a subsistence farmer a damn foolish thing to do; new roads and automobiles making fleeing to the city easier than ever; and the TVA and other federal land grabs displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Last Wednesday night, Britain was robbed of one of its best-loved trees. Mike Pratt, the CEO of Northumberland Wildlife Trust, describes the venerable, now-recumbent sycamore at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall as a “totem tree; a touch point in the landscape”.

But the tree, standing alone in a national park, also reminded some of how nature-depleted England is. As environmentalist Ben Goldsmith said at the time: “That someone would have destroyed this iconic tree is beyond comprehension; but what’s even more shocking is that this was pretty much the only tree in that entire landscape. Our national parks can and should be so much better.”

According to Northumberland Wildlife Trust’s latest estimates, just 7% of Northumberland meets the criteria needed for the UK government to fulfil its commitment to protect and prioritise 30% of the landscape for nature by 2030 – which is a little higher than the 5% average across England as a whole.

While Goldsmith overstates the case somewhat, low tree cover does partly explain why Northumberland is sometimes called the “land of far horizons”. The most remote and least populated of England’s national parks, its rolling hills are swathed by expansive areas of open moor, peatland, as well as large forestry plantations.

In common with most other national parks in Britain, much of this land is grazed by sheep and cattle. As Pratt explains, over decades and centuries, agriculture has gradually become more intensive, with the result that areas of the national park are now almost devoid of trees and “feel a little bit industrial in parts”, he says. This is not the fault of individual farmers, Pratt argues. “It’s just that no one’s ever made any big decisions about what it should look like, probably since Roman times.”

Now, the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap has given local communities and land managers a reason to reflect on, and make some serious choices about, how this landscape should look and function in the years to come.

A vision of renewal

From Pratt’s perspective, the corridor of land that roughly follows Hadrian’s Wall, from England’s east coast to west, is “possibly the biggest opportunity for a wilder landscape in England”.

On Wednesday, Northumberland national park authority announced its plans for how one part of that corridor would be renewed, with a new project signalling “a transformative shift towards a nature-first approach to land management”.

The project has been two years in the planning, but unveiling it this week, in the immediate aftermath of loss of the region’s most famous tree, felt like a fitting riposte to that crime. Tony Gates, chief executive of the National Park Authority, explained in a press release that his team decided it was imperative to seize the moment. “We are living through a nature crisis, a climate crisis and a wellbeing crisis,” he writes. “We must use this strength of feeling to drive change, for nature recovery and for our health and wellbeing.”

In the winter in southern England, evergreen trees like the Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) stand out. Ancient people saw the pine tree as a symbol of eternal life, which gave rise to our modern custom of Christmas trees.

The Scots Pine is the only native pine species in the British Isles. This species ranges from Western Europe to Eastern Siberia. The Scots Pine is only naturally found in Scotland in modern times, but in ancient times pine forests grew all over the British Isles. These forests died out due to climate change and human activity, but Scots Pine have been subsequently reintroduced as ornamentals and for forestry.

In these photos, we can see the two types of reproductive structures found on Scots Pine and other conifers. The classic pinecones are the female reproductive structures, known as ovulate cones, seed cones, or megastrobilus. These cones contain the ovules which will develop into seeds once fertilised by pollen. These cones open up their scales to allow wind blown pollen into the cones, after which the cones close up to allow the fertilised ovules to mature into seeds. After 6-8 months the cone opens again to let the winged seeds fly away on the wind to colonise new habitats. The second photo shows the male cones (microstrobilus or pollen cones) which contain pollen sacs under their scales. Scots Pine need to exchange pollen with another individual tree in order to reproduce.

Pine needles are also a delicious and healthy ingredient for herbal tea! Native Americans and East Asians have used pine needles from species in the Pinus genus for centuries as a healthy winter tonic. Pine needle tea is made by crushing and cutting the pine needles into small pieces and steeping them in boiling water. Medical research indicates pine needles are rich in antioxidants, vitamin A, and vitamin C. The taste is not like "pine scented air freshener" and more of a mellow citrusy flavour that combines exquisitely with cinnamon and gunpowder green tea. According to what I've read, all needles from Pinus genus species are safe for brewing unless you're pregnant.

What does Charborough Park, Dorset (above) and Drax Hall, Barbados (below) have in common?

Both belong to the super-rich UK Conservative MP Richard Drax.

Also... slavery

Drax Hall Estate: is a still operating 621 acre sugar plantation owned by the Drax family since the 1640s. Dubbed a 'killing field' it is estimated that close to 30,000 enslaved African men, women and children died on the Drax Caribbean plantations over 200 years, while the Drax family made enormous profits. The family also part-owned at least two slave ships.

By 1832, shortly before slavery was abolished, there were 275 people enslaved on the plantation producing 300 tons of sugar and 140 puncheons of rum. Though slavery was abolished during 1833-1834, abuses still continued.

The Drax family meanwhile received compensation for the end of slavery. Records show John Sawbridge Erle-Drax was awarded £4,293 12s 6d - worth £3M today - for 189 slaves.

The Barbados MP Trevor Prescod commented that “The Drax family had slave ships. They had agents in the African continent and kidnapped black African people to work on their plantations here in Barbados. I have no doubt that what would have motivated them was that they never perceived us to be equal to them, that we were human beings. They considered us as chattels.”

The Drax family also expanded into Jamaica, but sold those estates in the 1850s.

Barbados and Jamaica are rightfully seeking reparations from the Drax family.

In 2021 it was claimed that the current Drax Hall workforce earns as little as £24 a day (half the Barbados average wage), and the modest retirement bonus of workers has been axed.

Charborough Park: is a 7000 acre estate flanked by the longest brick boundary wall in England. Stretching for miles and consisting of nearly 3 million bricks, it's mockingly known as the Great Wall of Dorset.

The Hall is the ancestral and current home of the Drax family.

Author Nick Hayes has commented that "this wall, surrounding the grounds of Charborough House ... was built by Richard Drax’s ancestor, John Sawbridge, who married into the Drax dynasty, and who was able to finance the build following a recent windfall from his sugar-cane estates in the Caribbean – although the money came not from his sugar, but from his slaves."

English plantation owners including the Drax family used the vast profits from slavery to buy land (once common land) back in England, which often came with a parliamentary seat before later reforms. So in other words the profits of slavery effectively provided their political careers, as they stole what was once public land.

Nick Hayes: "The interior of the Drax estate tells a silent story of what the colonialists did with their property. The purchase of land secured a firmer grip on power, not just in one lifetime, but for many generations to come. Farming, forestry, pleasure gardens, hunting, shooting – all of these became reliable sources of income, an accumulation of private profit in direct proportion to the dispossession of the commonwealth. In fact, what happened abroad – the mining of minerals, the rent on land, the dispossession of the locals – were colonial methods first practiced on English soil, as the landlords colonised the commons at home."

A further 125 properties in Dorset alone brings the total land ownership in the county to around 14000 acres. Drax owns other estates across the UK.

Harrow educated Richard Drax is worth an estimated £150 million. A far-right Tory MP (and sometime BBC journalist?!) since 2010 and the sixth of that family to be an MP, he is a rabid Brexiteer, opposed to such as covid lockdowns and the minimum wage. He was caught underpaying some of his Dorset employees in what was claimed an "error" - he seems to make many such "errors" such as failing to declare ownership of the Drax Estate as a member of parliament.

In 2010 Richard Drax stated that “I can’t be held responsible for something 300 or 400 years ago. They are using the class thing and that’s not what this election is about, it’s not what I stand for and I ignore it.” On this Nick Hayes commented "Blunt, but effective, especially since the education system and institutions of England have followed the same approach." 

Whether Drax acknowledges it or not his position, his entire life, wealth and career is a consequence and benefit of the slave trade, a trade that ended less than 200 hundred years ago on his Barbados estate - which continues to exploit its workforce to the present.

David Comissiong, Barbados ambassador to the Caribbean Community, said: “This was a crime against humanity and we impose upon him and his family a moral responsibility to contribute to the effort to repair the damage.

You can’t simply walk away from the scene of the crime. They have a responsibility now to make some effort to help repair the damage.”

As an MP, Drax has supported lowering welfare benefits, ending educational financial support for 16 to 19-year-olds, and the imposition of the “bedroom tax” on poor council tenants. During an immigration debate in parliament Drax - the owner of a 7000 acre estate with little but a mansion complex built upon it stated “this country is full”.

And Drax is just one of many similar people in the UK (and beyond).

Horror Movies: Something Old, Something New

Five double features, each matchup featuring a similar theme, plot, or style--but separated by at least twenty years.

Matango (1963, 1h 30m) and Gaia (2021, 1h 30m): Matango is the story of a group of boaters shipwrecked on a strange island infested with bizarre mushrooms. Based on a 1907 short story called The Voice In The Night (read it on archive.org here) and directed by Ishirō Honda, one of the directors and writers of the original Godzilla, it's spine-tingling tale. Gaia takes place in a South African forest, where a pair of forestry service employees discover that the forest is alive in a whole different way than they thought. Both stories deal with fungus, changing human bodies, and ecological disaster. You may want to avoid mushrooms and blue cheese for a bit after these.

The Red Shoes (1948, 2h 15m) and The Red Shoes (2005, 1h 45m): Both of these stories take their title and overall themes from the same Hans Christian Andersen story. You can read the story here. Separated by nearly sixty years and multiple continents--since the 1948 film was made in England and the 2005 film was made in South Korea--they're well worth comparing. Two different times and cultures tackle the same story, and come out with stories that are fully distinct yet strikingly similar.

Ghostwatch (1992, 1h 30m) and Late Night With the Devil (2024, 1h 30m): On Halloween night in 1992, on live TV, a BBC documentary crew enters a haunted house to witness a haunting, only for everything to go horribly wrong--or at least that's the premise of Ghostwatch. The BBC created its mockumentary using its established TV personalities and other added elements of realism, resulting in a War of the Worlds type of national panic. It's never been run on any UK TV channel again. Late Night With the Devil takes a similar spin, although it doesn't present itself as happening today: it's a documentary of events occurring on live TV in 1977. Despite that, watch the plot beats. See if you can spot Ghostwatch. I was able to predict almost the exact plot of the film once I realized what was going on (although it didn't detract from my enjoyment at all).

The Thing (1982, 1h 50m) and 30 Days of Night (2007, 1h 50m): Two different takes on "stranded in an icy polar wasteland," one taking place in Antarctica and the other in Alaska. In the first, the monstrous chaos comes from a shapeshifting alien, while in the second, it's vampires. However, as different as its monsters are, 30 Days of Night pays plenty of homage to The Thing. From helicopter sabotage to prevent escape to a striking shot that evokes the theatrical poster of The Thing, 30 Days of Night shows where it came from. TW for dog death in both movies.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963, 1h 45m) and Bonestorm (short film from VHS: Viral 2014, anthology runtime 1h 20m): Okay, so Jason and the Argonauts isn't exactly horror. It's a retelling of the myth of the same name, with Jason and his crew of heroes sailing to find the Golden Fleece. As much as it is heroic fantasy, it's also full of monsters--stop-motion hydras, harpies, and more created by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. The grand finale is a battle against a group of animated skeletons, which you can watch here. Fifty years later, the makers of Bonestorm revisited the same idea, as a pair of skateboarders battle cultists-turned-skeletons on a trip to Mexico.

Food for thought: Whether or not the more recent filmmakers were aware of the older movies is uncertain, but what can we as viewers draw from these strikingly similar works? Do the old-school effects hold up next to their modern counterparts? In the Matango/Gaia and Red Shoes double features, different cultures are also in play. What's the impact of that on the stories? What does it say about horror that we keep going back to revisit the same themes and stories?

(Previous Recommendations)

Endangered Moth Makes Comeback

The barberry carpet moth is one of the UK’s rarest invertebrate species, with only 12 known populations, but now it has seen a resurgence in the Blandford Forest, Dorset following a project to restore its habitat.

With the help of volunteers, the Forestry England and Butterfly Conservation project planted the native barberry plant in Blandford Forest, resulting in an increase of larvae found in the forest from 14 in 2018 to 50 this year. The conservationist Mark Parsons, who carried out the survey, told the BBC; "This year's fantastic result clearly demonstrates what can be achieved by working together with relatively little, but regular and annual resources... with larvae found on nearly every bush looked at during this year's survey."

Throughout the 19th century, the barberry plant was cleared from hedgerows because it was believed to be a vector for wheat rusk fungus, which is a problem for the barberry carpet moth, because it’s caterpillars depend on it quite heavily. Modern strains of wheat are resistant to the fungus, so barberry can be grown wherever its needed.

Forestry England wildlife ranger Mark Warn told the BBC; "A lot of the conservation work we've done is rebuilding species resilience so we haven't just got one site, we've got a number of sites across Blandford Forest.”

With more planting of the barberry plant, who knows how much the populations of the barberry carpet moth might increase by.

Source: BBC News

hey you added that quote about gothic architecture mimicing trees. Do you have the source of that? it sounds really interesting

yes of course! it's from chapter 3 "the reformation and the disenchantment of nature" (pp. 105–134) in todd a. borlik's ecocriticism and early modern english literature: green pastures. the quote in question can be found on page 106. this is the complete paragraph:

Fiscal forestry and the Georgic Revolution were not the only forces reshaping the experience of the English landscape in the sixteenth century. The Reformation, in addition to opening vast tracts of land to commercial exploitation, heavily impacted the way people thought and felt about the presence of the sacred in nature. Long before the first Christian church was erected on English soil, Ancient Britons, under the auspices of the Druids, worshipped in sacred groves known as nemeton. Although the association of the Druids with Stonehenge has been exposed as an eighteenth-century fabrication, archeological evidence and the writings of Roman historians such as Tacitus confirm their ceremonial use of forest sites. When Christianity arrived, it grudgingly assimilated many of the old rites and customs into its own praxis. Two letters written by Pope Gregory at the time of St. Augustine of Canterbury’s expedition to England shed light on the compromise adopted by the early missionaries. In the first, dated June 601, Gregory urges King Ethelbert of Kent to completely suppress the native pagan faiths. But before the convoy reached Canterbury, Gregory changed his strategy.

'Do not, after all pull down the fanes. Destroy the idols; purify the buildings with holy water; set relics there; and let them become temples of the true God. So the people will have no need to change their places of concourse, and where of old they were wont to sacrifice cattle to demons, thither let them . . . slay their beast no longer as a sacrifice, but for a social meal in honour of Him whom they now worship.'

A survey of sacred sites and religious practices in medieval England suggests that the early proselytes took Gregory’s advice to heart. In his magisterial study, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas amply documents the persistence of old pagan beliefs in the numerous rituals conducted outside church walls in the fields and forests of the English countryside. Many of these ceremonies consisted of petitionary prayers to saints to bring good weather, protect the crops, and ensure a bountiful harvest; some of them even involved the woodlands. For instance, a ceremonial “blessing of trees” to encourage their regeneration was regularly observed on the Twelfth Day after Christmas in many parts of the country. Foresters likewise often recited special prayers when planting or grafting to aid the sapling’s growth. Although the early Church had uprooted the groves of the Druids, medieval churchyards themselves almost invariably featured a sacred yew. Vestiges of tree worship can even be detected in Gothic architecture, which has been seen as simulating in stone the experience of walking beneath a forest’s soaring canopy.

Spring Walk Kent Weald..AONB by Adam Swaine Via Flickr: Walking amongst a carpet of bluebells with their beautiful flowers nodding in a gentle breeze is a truly magical springtime experience. Usually flowering from late March to early May, this year’s mild winter and spring means we may well see them early and Forestry England expects a bumper bluebell display in the nation’s forests. Surrounding yourself with the delicate scent and sea of blue colour is a must-do spring nature experience

A Dreamtime story from the Nuenonne First Nation of Bruny Island off the Southeast Coast of Tasmania (lutruwita) narrates how [...] a young pup [...] of the “Tasmanian tiger” (thylacine) [...] transformed [...] into corinna [...]. When lutruwita -- Tasmania, also known as Van Dieman’s Land -- was opened for British colonization in 1803, a medley of settlers -- from [...] fortune-seekers to species hunters -- made it to the island in the course of a few years. Travel guides and memoirs published at the time soon dubbed Tasmania the “sanatorium of India,” drawing many British colonists to the island who hoped to recuperate their health debilitated by prolonged stay in the tropics.

More significantly, it wasn’t only materials and bodies that circulated between the colonies [India and Tasmania]. But also ideas, impressions, and experiences gained in one colony made their way to the other. [...]

Settler farmers identified the thylacine as a “blood sucking vampire” [...]. [P]olitician John Lyne -- a representative of the Tasmanian rural lobby -- proclaimed, quite preposterously, that “30000 or 40000 sheep” were taken each year by the thylacine [...]. By 1830, the Van Diemen’s Land Company was already offering a reward for the killing of [...] the “hyena” i.e. the thylacine. Likewise, Mercury reported in 1882 in a piece headlined “Tiger Extermination” that landowners declared “a reward of £5 to be paid for each full-grown tiger [...] and £2 10s, for all cubs [...]." As a result, the animal [...] was extirpated by 1936. Comparison between the thylacine and the Indian tiger abounded in settler discourses [...]. This was in spite of the fact that the thylacine and the Indian tiger were two entirely different species, morphologically and ecologically. [...] Yet early settlers in Tasmania, many of whom had first landed on or had connections in British India carried the idea of the tiger as a ferocious predator [...]. [T]hese representations of the thylacine’s “nature” were based on faulty understanding of the animal perpetuated by myopic colonial science that privileged imperial economic interests above all. [...]

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One of the major thylacine traders in Tasmania was James Harrison. Known as the “West Coast naturalist,” Harrison purchased and sold about twenty-five live animals and twenty dead specimens of thylacine. He was born in the Nowgong district of Assam in northeast India to a family of speculators en route from England. It is noteworthy that James Harrison spent his childhood in a region in India that was known for its [...] wildlife. Game hunting [...] was [...] [a] common pursuit among the Europeans in Assam [...]. Moreover, the period saw a spike in the visit of professional hunters and species collectors to the region as vast [habitat] was being stripped off to make way for tea plantations. [...]

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William Thomas Dennison, who served as governors of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and Madras in India, described in Varieties of Vice Regal Life (1870) the tiger hunts he had organized in India. Dennison’s book reinforced the idea that the tiger is a pest, an impediment to human progress, which echoed his policies towards the thylacine during his stint as the governor of Tasmania (1847-1854). [...]

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Likewise, Sainthill Eardley Wilmot -- the grandson of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land from 1843 to 1846 -- served as a forestry officer in British India. Sainthill was born in Hobart in 1852 and spent his early life there. In My Home In Tasmania (1852), Louisa Ann Meredith mentions the presence of an “untamed” wild thylacine in Sainthill’s grandfather Sir John Eardley Wilmot’s private menagerie in Hobart. Later Sainthill Eardley Wilmot would take a particularly hostile attitude towards the tiger and other big cat species while working as the Inspector General of Forests in British India. [...] He also wrote an it-narrative about the Indian tiger, The Life of a Tiger (1911), that predicted the tiger’s impending extinction. On multiple occasions, he has alluded to the thylacine “wreaking havoc” on flocks of sheep in Tasmania. [...]

The material circulation of the living thylacine in India is little known apart from an exhibition of two live members of the species at Madras Zoo in 1886 [...]. The narrative circulation of the animal, however, has been relatively plentiful.

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Text by: Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya. "Constellation Spirit, Vicious Vermin, and Icon of Environmental Guilt: Affective Entanglements of the Thylacine in Tasmania and India". The Otter, Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). Emotional Ecologies series (edited Jessica M. DeWitt and Sarah E. York-Bertram). 20 July 2023. [Image and caption also published and included in Bhattacharya's article. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

not to be a forestry major on main but that’s not. that’s not a beech tree. the leaves look maple esque at best, and the bark is too dark. also RED beech tree?? that doesn’t even exist 😭 the only beech in new england is american beech (whose leaves turn yellow in the fall anyway).

based on the art i truely beleive they were trying to go for red maple but something got lost in translation.

The Amazing Resilience of Nature

One of the most amazing things about nature is the incredible examples of resilience seen within ecosystems. In a world that is constantly changing, nature can persist through even the harshest conditions to bounce back to its original form or make way for new life.

What is resilience? There are many different definitions of resilience used in ecology. Ecological resilience can be described as a natural system's ability to absorb the effects of a disturbance before the system changes states (Death, 2024). Engineering resilience is a natural system's ability to bounce back from disturbances to its previous state (Death, 2024; Thorogood et al., 2023). Overall, resilience is the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its structure or function with little change following a disturbance.

Here is a picture my mom took of tree roots that had been lifted from the ground after a downburst occurred at our cottage. After my dad cut the fallen trees, the roots and attached soil fell back over the rocks. The next year many of the trees survived and new trees and shrubs grew.

The disturbances ecosystems face can be naturally occurring events such as seasonal floods, storms, and wildfires. Humans create additional pressures such as climate change, urbanization, overexploitation of natural resources, pollution, the introduction of invasive species and more (Thorogood et al., 2023). It is the organism's and ecosystem's ability to prosper in the face of these events that makes a natural system resilient.

It may be hard to believe but wildfires can be good for an ecosystem. Forests in Canada have experienced periotic natural disturbances such as fires, insect infestations, diseases, and floods for thousands of years (Canada, 2023). These forests have adapted to these conditions to live through these events (Canada, 2023). These natural disturbances are a natural part of the life cycle of forests and even help renew life in these areas (Canada, 2023).

Here is a picture of a wildfire burning near the Pondosy Bay Wilderness Resort in B.C. (Laanela, 2018).

As a fire swipes across a forest, a door is opened to allow new life to grow. As the tree litter on the forest floor burns, nutrients that have been stored are released back into the soil. These nutrients allow soil to support the growth of new plant and tree life. Forest fires open the forest canopy supporting new life to grow as sunlight reaches the forest floor (Canada, 2023). Amazingly, some species of tree such as lodgepole and jack pine trees need forest fires to reproduce (Bushey et al.; Canada, 2023). The heat from forest fires allows the cones on these trees to open and release their seeds. Without forest fires, these tree species would not be able to reproduce (Bushey et al., 2023).

This is a picture of the cones on a lodgepole pine tree. Picture from Forestry England (n.d.).

Forest's ability to survive and create new life following wildfires is an incredible example of natural resilience. However, the increased frequency and intensity of wildfires in the wake of climate change can reduce forests' resilience to fires (Bushey et al., 2023).

This is a picture of the cones on Jack pine trees. Picture from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (2014).

Humans can disrupt the remarkable resilience of many ecosystems through anthropogenic activities. For example, when extreme forest fires or floods occur annually there is not enough time to allow even the most resilient animals and plants to bounce back. However, when humans support nature, the true resiliency of nature can be truly inspirational.

The reintroduction of Yellow Stone wolves is a story I am sure many of you have heard. Between 1872-1926 wolves were hunted and removed from Yellowstone. Following the eradication of gray wolves, elk populations doubled, and overgrazing caused many plants and trees to die off (Peglar, 2023). The entire ecosystem was disrupted.

Rodent and bird populations declined due to habitat loss (National Geographic, 2024). Grizzle bear populations declined due to the lack of berries needed to eat before hibernation. The riverbanks eroded due to overgrazing and caused sediment to affect the water quality (Peglar, 2023; National Geographic, 2024). The whole ecosystem changed because of the loss of the gray wolves.

On January 12, 1995, eight wolves from Jasper National Park in Alberta were introduced to Yellowstone. A total of 41 wolves were introduced. Following this, the elk population was reduced and helped prevent overgrazing. The wolves even created elk populations more resilient to drought due to the thinning out of weak and sick elk (Peglar, 2023).

The wolves prevented elk from overgrazing along the river. This allowed trees to grow along the riverbank, protecting the river from erosion (Peglar, 2023). This improved water quality and supported beavers and aquatic organisms to increase in numbers (National Geographic, 2024). The reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park with the help of humans promoted biodiversity and higher resilience to this ecosystem.

Nature is incredibly resilient to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. With conservation efforts seen in natural areas and everyday action taken to protect the environment, people can help support the resilience of nature. By maintaining resilient ecosystems, humans and nature can thrive in a constantly changing world.

References

Bushey, D., Osmer, M., Green, H., Garneau, D., & Lesser, M. (2023). Forest resilience and regeneration dynamics following wildfire disturbance. Ecosphere, 14(9). https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4655

Canada, N. R. (2023, June 22). Why forests need fires, insects and diseases. Natural Resources Canada. https://natural-resources.canada.ca/our-natural-resources/forests/insects-disturbances/why-forests-need-fires-insects-and-diseases/13081

Death, R. G. (2024). The resilience of Riverine Ecological Communities. Resilience and Riverine Landscapes, 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-323-91716-2.00016-9

Enel Group. (n.d.). Ecological resilience: How ecosystems adapt to change. Enel. https://www.enel.com/company/stories/articles/2023/03/ecological-resilience

National Geographic. (n.d.). Wolves of Yellowstone. Education. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/wolves-yellowstone/

Peglar, T. (2023, June 22). Yellowstone’s most controversial residents. Yellowstone National Park. https://www.yellowstonepark.com/park/conservation/yellowstone-wolves-reintroduction/

Thorogood, R., Mustonen, V., Aleixo, A., Aphalo, P. J., Asiegbu, F. O., Cabeza, M., Cairns, J., Candolin, U., Cardoso, P., Eronen, J. T., Hällfors, M., Hovatta, I., Juslén, A., Kovalchuk, A., Kulmuni, J., Kuula, L., Mäkipää, R., Ovaskainen, O., Pesonen, A.-K., … Vanhatalo, J. (2023). Understanding and applying biological resilience, from genes to ecosystems. Npj Biodiversity, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-023-00022-6

Picture Credits

Forestry England. (n.d.). Lodgepole Pine. Forestry England. https://www.forestryengland.uk/article/lodgepole-pine

Laanela , M. (2018, August 15). B.C. declares state of emergency as hundreds of wildfires burn across province | CBC News. CBCnews. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-declares-state-of-emergency-as-hundreds-of-wildfires-burn-across-province-1.4785983

Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. (2014, July 18). Jack Pine. ontario.ca. https://www.ontario.ca/page/jack-pine

The Repton Shrubs Encounter and More” | Paranormal Stories

In this video, I look at two cases, including one from Hawaii in which the witness claims he encountered some very strange creatures involved in a ceremony. In the other, from England, a forestry worker describes the day he encountered a unique animal of some kind.

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They talked about ecology and monocultures a little while ago in school and I guess I thought it was intresting, so heres another thing monocultures fuck up. You know, just for fun :)

They're really bad for biodiversity. Both animals and plants have a certain environment they've evolved to live in. If you cut down large parts of a forest and then plant down trees from only one species, all the animals and plants who aren't suited for that forest won't be able to survive there anymore.

This is also not an america only problem.

Here in sweden we are fucking up our forests by clearing large areas and then replanting them as monocultures (so much for sustainable forestry).

Im sure similar things are happening in other countries too. I'd guess it's more common in countries that export materials and stuff from trees

so what is the POINT of replanting if it's just fucking things up!! and its a GLOBAL thing too.... it's so easy to just look into the environment of the area and then plant according to that!! it's so easy!!

its such an easy problem to avoid but somehow people are STILL doing things like this despite the impact on the environment.. i think i read that it was a profit-based thing somewhere, which doesn't at all surprise me, but still so frustrating man!!

i've genuinely never heard of this, i'll need to look into if it's an issue in england as well, but you're right it is pretty interesting!! /gen