'WHAT would the world be,' asked Gerard Manley

Hopkins, 'once bereft, of wet and wilderness. Let them be

left.'

Had the 19th century English poet attended the

recent sell out 'Hands Off Our Forest' meeting he would

have been heartened by the barely suppressed outrage

expressed at the Coalition Government's proposals

(apparently supported by the whipped Tory Forest of Dean

district councillors) to sell off the Forest of Dean.

If David Cameron thinks that we don't care who

owns the Forest of Dean (23 of the 29 members of his

Cabinet apparently care quite a lot about each being

worth more than £1 million) he's in for a shock.

And if Mark Harper, in his absence, wants to know

what he (and his colleagues) should admit to when he

graces us with his presence it is that in this over-crowded

island of ours his Government should cease behaving like

a city trader on speed with that most precious of

commodities, which is nature's wilderness. ('Only after the

last tree has been cut down,' says a Cree Indian prophecy,

'only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.') Or

else we'll all be forced to conclude that it's not just Oscar

Wilde's cynic who 'knows the price of everything and the

value of nothing.'

'The gross heathenism of civilisation,' wrote John

Muir, 'has generally destroyed Nature, poetry and all that

is spiritual.'

'Keep close to nature's heart,' said the Scottish-

born father of America's National Parks, 'for the clearest

way to the universe is through a forest wilderness. God

has cared for these trees...but he cannot save them from

fools.'

– John Muir, Newnham.