📚’A non-fiction investigation into Britain’s temperate rainforests.’ Rosie’s #Bookreview Of The Lost Rainforests Of Britain by @guyshrubsole

The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Lost Rainforests of Britain is a non-fiction investigation into Britain’s temperate rainforests. These are primarily located in small pockets along the western regions from Cornwall and Devon, through Wales and along the Western coast and isles of Scotland.

Author Guy Shrubsole puts forward a realistic case with positive solutions to help combat the climate crisis in our own back yard. I am sure that I am not alone in discovering that Britain had and has its own rainforests. However, like those in the Amazon, they are under serious threat. In Britain over-grazing from sheep and deer, coupled with fern loving Victorians, mass conifer forests and the introduction of Rhododendrons have endangered our own carbon absorbing ancient woodlands.

Turning the past around is multi-pronged; it’s not just planting more trees and effects won’t happen overnight but small comebacks are beginning and more awareness is needed if Britain is to restore it’s much needed rainforests.

This book has been on my wish list for a while and I am glad that I finally got a copy. It is very readable, while highlighting how our rainforests have been endangered. With more public awareness, I’d like to hope that our own rainforests can be part of our future.

View all my reviews  on Goodreads

In 2020, writer and campaigner Guy Shrubsole moved from London to Devon. As he explored the wooded valleys, rivers and tors of Dartmoor, Guy discovered a spectacular habitat that he had never encountered before: temperate rainforest. Entranced, he would spend the coming
months investigating the history, ecology and distribution of rainforests
across England, Wales and Scotland.

Britain, Guy discovered, was once a rainforest nation.

This is the story of a unique habitat that has been so ravaged, most people today don’t realise it exists. Temperate rainforest may once have covered up to one-fifth of Britain and played host to a dazzling variety of luminous life-forms, inspiring Celtic druids, Welsh wizards, Romantic poets, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s most loved creations. Though only fragments now remain, they form a rare and internationally important habitat, home to lush ferns and beardy lichens, pine martens and pied flycatchers. But why are even environmentalists unaware of their existence? And how have we managed to so comprehensively excise them from our cultural memory?

Taking the reader on an awe-inspiring journey through the Atlantic oakwoods and hazelwoods of the Western Highlands and the Lake District, down to the rainforests of Wales, Devon and Cornwall, The Lost Rainforests of Britain maps these under-recognised ecosystems in exquisite detail – but underlines that without immediate political and
public support, we risk losing them from the landscape, and perhaps our collective memory, forever. A rich, elegaic and boundary-pushing feat of research and reportage, this is the extraordinary tale of one person’s quest to find Britain’s lost rainforests, and bring them back.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS