Europeans are forest people. Despite our national differences, our childhoods are full of forest tales and we can find shared identity in memories of walking and playing in the woods and climbing trees. That’s because forests and woodland cut across the breadth of Europe, from the breathtakingly green woods of Ireland
to the dense ancient forests of Romania. And they are part of many peoples’ daily lives – be it families out picking berries and collecting mushrooms in Finland or people taking respite from the heat in Greece. But these forests are under threat. They are being illegally cut for ski resorts, levelled to make way for coal mines, decimated for bioenergy and hit by the pests that climate change is increasing. European Forests, European Lives puts faces to Europe’s forest stories with the hope of reminding policy makers that there is a huge difference between tree plantations and real healthy forests. It hopes to convince them that our forests deserve to not just be protected, but to also be restored. With so many forest stories across Europe it was hard to narrow them down to these few tales, but they give a sense of the kinds of things that go on in European forests every day.
