Book Review - The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole

Our Green Book Group chose to read this because the author used to work for Friends of the Earth! Guy Shrubsole is a similar age to me so his memories of coming to environmentalism through campaigning to save the rainforests as a child in the 1990s were very familiar. Like him, I drew pictures of tropical rainforests at school, replete with monkeys, vines and parrots, and thought that the rainforests were all in South America. What we missed back then is that Britain has its own temperate rainforests, although only fragments remain.

The western parts of England, Wales and Scotland have high rainfall and therefore provide the perfect conditions for woodland to become rainforest, where mosses, lichens and ferns festoon the trees as epiphytes (a.k.a. plants growing on other plants). The author explains that these rainforests feature in our folklore, like the Welsh cycle of stories known as the Mabinogion, and our modern mythology, like the Lord of the Rings. This shows that they were once more widespread. However, they've mostly been cut down and prevented from regenerating by the overgrazing of sheep and deer. The fragments that persist are often still not protected properly and hadn't even been mapped until Guy Shrubsole crowdsourced information through the Lost Rainforests website and created an incredibly useful Google map. 

Through the book, the author visits many of these rainforest fragments and talks to the people trying to protect them, to learn how special this habitat is. However, their ecological importance has often been overlooked. One horrifying chapter tells the story of a couple who bought an estate near Totnes in the early twentieth century and cut down an area of rainforest to replace it with 'more productive' conifer plantation! To add insult to injury, their estate manager lobbied the government to encourage more landowners to do the same. But there are also stories of hope; the overgrazed gulley of Lustleigh Cleave re-grew its rainforest in a few decades when the commoners removed their animals, thanks to a dormant seedbank waiting in the soil and the industry of squirrels and jays. Nature can recover, when it is allowed the space.

The photos in the book and the lovely descriptions of mosses and lichens left us all wanting to visit one of Britain's rainforests. We're now planning to get a guide to temperate rainforest plants and go on a Leicester Friends of the Earth road trip!