The British Isles Today

Abstract

Throughout this book there has been stress on the importance of the physical environment. This, it is important to note, has also been greatly affected by human activity. Woods have been cleared, so that virtually none of the original virgin forest has survived. Since 1945 45 per cent of the United Kingdom’s ancient seminatural forest has been damaged or destroyed. Rivers have been deepened and straightened, coastlines altered. This has been a long process. The marshland of the Fens, for example, has been progressively drained from the Roman period to the present day, with particular activity in the seventeenth century and following the arrival of steam pumps from the 1820s. Yet at no stage has there been such pressure on the environment as in modern Britain. Other creatures are decimated by human activities: between 3,000 and 5,000 barn owls being killed on UK roads each year. Pine martens, members of the weasel family, were reported in 1995 to have vanished from England in 1994 and to be on the brink of extinction in Wales. On the other hand, the Welsh red kite has been brought back from the brink of extinction. Environmental concern is greater now than ever before. This has been institutionalised with the creation of national parks in England and Wales (1949) and areas of outstanding natural beauty, and the foundation of the Countryside Commission in 1968.