The Duchy of Cornwall has announced an ambitious plan to regenerate and expand Wistman’s Wood, one of the last remnants of temperate rainforest in the South West.
Rumoured to be haunted, the wood is said to be the remainder of what was once a great forest which covered much of Dartmoor since 7000 BC, before Neolithic hunter-gatherers cleared it around 5000 BC. However, the woodland is also vulnerable to threats such as fire, disease and climate change, due to its small size and isolation.
David Cope, Head of Sustainability at the Duchy of Cornwall, said: “We are pleased to share details on how we will regenerate and encourage the expansion of Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor. Wistman’s Wood is an incredibly special place for both nature and people. The woodland provides a home for some very rare species, making this work extremely important for our goal of a net zero and nature-rich estate.”
Creating nine hectares of new wood pasture on the west side of the River Dart opposite Wistman’s Wood, with more areas proposed further along the riparian corridor across other Duchy farms.
This exciting plan to allow the wood to expand through regeneration will give it long-term resilience and provide a wealth of benefits for people and nature.
I agree re: accidentally transporting ash dieback fungus between woods and things like that, but I also think that the idea of the “unspoiled wildness” where no human has ever gone is a product of colonialism, as recent studies have demonstrated that most of what has been considered “unspoiled wildness” such as the prairies in the USA and even the Amazon Forest in Brasil and neighbouring countries, not to mention the PNW rainforests were actually sites of heavy human-nature interactions and even of deliberate cultivation of mutually beneficial relationships between plants, animals and humans. It was unspoiled only as far as westernised land ownership and exploitation patterns were not evident.
I believe that while education and respect for fragile and fragilised environments is absolutely necessary, the negative effects of the exclusion of humans from nature far outweigh the positives.
Also, the Duchy of Cornwall is not in any shape or form a community, it’s a landlord from an aristocratic system of land tenure which deliberately excluded communities from the land they held in common through dispossession, enclosure and displacement.
Here is some info on the Duchy of Cornwall -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Cornwall
I think that the Justice of an aristocrat-led transition that reinforces private land ownership is debatable.
Preaching to the choir. I get you.
Though I’m of the thought that people need to spend a gross majority of their time restoring the environment after the damage of the last 300 years+ rather than just wandering around in it. We’re obligated after people spent their lifetimes doing the opposite and destroying it. If that includes a hybrid indigenous and modern knowledge forest management, then all the better.
I know a lot of environmentalists that just “hike”, enjoying themselves rather than putting in a modicum of effort into environmental management even while it’s actively degrading (ownership comes heavily into this). This part bothers me and I’ve noticed it more and more as life gets “harder”, people’s need to be “happy” excludes any physical work.
But the Devil’s advocate in me says we should allow some wild areas. I’m not saying this particular piece of forest in the OP is it, just that we have been into everything as colonialists and if there were areas that even earlier people didn’t go into, we could restore some wildness as a gift back to nature.