BRING BACK BRITAIN’S RAINFOREST
rewilding the duchy of cornwall
In 2023 we launched a petition to ask the Duchy of Cornwall, Prince William’s personal fiefdom and owner of a third of Dartmoor National Park, to restore rainforest on his lands. Dartmoor has some of the best and most well-known remaining fragments of temperate rainforest, and the perfect climactic conditions for them to prosper.
With the help of 76,000 signatories, and campaigns such as Lost Rainforests of Great Britain – Prince William vouched to double the size of Wistman’s Woods, the most famous rainforest in the UK!
small potatoes?
There’s no doubt that Prince William announcing he would allow Wistman’s Wood to double in size is a win! It’s a great start – but really, it is only the first step, amounting to just a fraction of his land on Dartmoor, only 0.01%! |
It’s hard to imagine now, but 20% of Britain was once covered in rare temperate rainforest. Just picture it: lynx, pine martens and bears once roamed amongst twisted oaks and dripping lichens whilst eagles and cranes soared overhead.
Tragically today less than 1% of Britain’s rainforests survive and most of these are unprotected and poorly managed for nature. So how are ordinary citizens like us going to bring them back?
wait, A rainforest nation?
Believe it or not, Britain is a rainforest nation. Most of us know tropical rainforest, but there is also temperate rainforest, where there is so much moisture in the air, it enables plants to grow on other plants, a telltale sign that you’re in rainforest. It once would have spread all along the west coast of our island, as well as hidden in valleys and ravines all over the country. It has a deep, mysterious and lush quality that has brought us myths like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Temperate rainforests have rich and rare ecosystems, full of lichens and mosses and ferns, oh my! They were truly the jewels of the British countryside, and could be so again.
our march for a wild dartmoor!
Make it wild or make it ours
Together with local campaigners, ecologists, artists, musicians, and families, we took our petition and threw down a 5-metre long gauntlet before the Duchy offices in Dartmoor, asking Prince William to ‘Make it Wild or Make it Ours’! Large landowners position themselves as ‘stewards’, but if they can’t take care of their land, then communities should instead.
We followed up with a sold-out discussion panel in Ashburton in February 2024, inviting a range of people that love nature on Dartmoor, including a farmer and commoner, a campaigner and a rep from Devon Wildlife Trust to talk about what we could do next, to make Dartmoor better for people and nature. In the spring we took people on a ‘People’s Perambulation’, a way to explore what the commons mean to us, and how we might envision Dartmoor as a common for all in the future.
Wild Card has joined the Dartmoor Nature Alliance to continue this work locally. There’s more to come on this campaign, so watch this space…
