'If anyone was born to save Britain's rainforests, it was Guy Shrubsole' Sunday Times From the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Who Owns England?, a mesmerising chronicle of our forgotten rainforests - and an inspiring intervention to help restore them to the places they once were
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, elegiac 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.
Guy Shrubsole is a writer and environmental campaigner. He has worked for Rewilding Britain, Friends of the Earth, the UK government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and New Zealand's Ministry of Agriculture. He has written widely for publications including the Guardian and New Statesman. His first book, Who Owns England?, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller.
Title: The Lost Rainforests of Britain
Author:
ISBN: 9780008527952
Binding:
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date: 2022-10-27
Number of Pages: 336
Weight: 0.6102 kg
'Fascinating, lyrical ... A celebration of these dazzling worlds and a plea to act before they are extinguished' The Times
'A treasure chest full of woodland jewels, rare, precious and beautiful'
Chris Packham
'A magnificent and crucial book that opens our eyes to untold wonders'
George Monbiot
'A beautiful, lyrical and urgent book full of myth, botany and adventure. The Lost Rainforests of Britain flips our understanding of rainforest ecology from something exotic to something we can all appreciate at home. I cannot recommend it enough'
Nick Hayes, author of the Sunday Times-bestselling The Book of Trespass
'Utterly enchanting, transporting and spellbinding ... A rallying cry for restoring the rainforests of Britain urgently, and an inspiring and informative must-read for anyone interested in rewilding and ecological restoration'
Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden
'Passionate, powerful, political and practicable, Guy Shrubsole gives us a blueprint for how to bring our missing rainforests back to life in all their riotous, tangled glory. Impeccably researched, convincingly argued and with generous measures of joyful discovery, this really is a spectacular book'
Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell
'In The Lost Rainforests of Britain, Guy Shrubsole deftly lays out the reasons why we need to care for these ancient wildernesses ... You might think we shouldn't need this book. But we do, and I'm extremely glad it exists'
Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan and Albert & the Whale
'Stunning ... Guy Shrubsole might just be as much a national treasure as those boggy forests he's become the preeminent biographer of'
Sam Lee, Mercury Prize-nominated musician and author of The Nightingale