>>1031314Yeah, that's called "the result of thousands of years of woodland clearance since neolithic man arrived" you muppet. Its hardly like we cut it all down last Tuesday; we've been changing our environment over thousands of years, and its resulted in great variety of different habitats present in the UK with enormous cultural and ecological value. And you talk about Belgians and Dutch having a better approach to conservation: I have had a visiting Dutch ecologist tell me that they wished the whole of the Netherlands had much ancient oak woodland as my whole county does!
Compare that to the very similar changes that have taken place in the US: Over a far smaller timescale, North Americans have drastically changed their environment: The Grand Banks fisheries, the San Joaquin Valley, the Prairies, the old growth forests from Appalachia to the Pacific Redwoods to the Boreal pine woods, all reduced to a shadow of what they were. But that's just what happens when man arrives. North Americans were forward thinking and lucky enough that they had the foresight to make efforts to preserve what wildlands they had left early on in their history as a young country, as land management in the US underwent radical change thanks to the birth of the conservation movement, due in part to the realization of the damage Americans were inflicting on their wilds. And even now, aspects of land management in the US has serious shortcomings, most notably in wildfire management policy. You're an ignorant fool if you think the UK is some sort of wasteland destroyed by man, who has probably never even visited.
