The meaning of the movement in the woods
Round one, then, goes to our nationwide army of tree-huggers. But if you study the detail, you’ll see that rounds two, three and onwards are still to be fought. True, the Government has started to back away from the indiscriminate sale and enclosure of our woodlands. But this weekend’s concession applies to just 15 per cent of forestry. The remaining 75 per cent is still - unless our pressure is sustained and successful – heading for the auctioneer’s hammer and thence to the barbed wire and chainsaws of privatisation (Mary Creagh explores background and jeopardy in her Guardian piece from February 11). If you’ve been following the campaign websites of the Woodland Trust and 38-Degrees you’ll have observed that whenever a target was set on a particular day for a new total of petition signatories it was almost always exceeded. Thinking, in the couple of weeks since I last blogged on the subject, about this extraordinarily vigorous response, I remembered a book I’d read back in 1998. Ca...