SEVERAL years ago in New Zealand I went to see an area of native bush (jungle). My first impression was that it looked messy, with many dead and rotting trees, and quite impenetrable beyond a narrow path that had been made to give access for a short distance. 

Then I began to see that it was bursting with life in so many forms, and realised that this was how things had been for tens of thousands of years.

By way of contrast, human activity over just a few hundred years is bringing about a mass extinction of plants and animals. Never before has one species, namely us, destroyed so much of the natural world of which we are a part.

Of course we need farms and forests and gardens, but a tidied-up paradise would be a fool's paradise. Were there neat lawns in the Garden of Eden?

Now that we know that our own survival depends on the healthy biodiversity of our small planet it would be a shame, quite literally, if boar became extinct in the Forest again.

– Geof Kinns, Church Rd, Cinderford.