Archeology blog of note….
Just so you know, I think The Life of Meaning has potential to be the archeological version of what John Hawks is to paleoanthropology or Chris to cognitive psychology. Mark’s latest post is titled The War on Trees, which caught my eye in light of this story in The Times that chronicles the expansion of wilderness in much of Europe due to the graying of the populace and the depopulation of the countryside. This waxing of the wild isn’t just limited to Europe, here in the United States wolves are on the march again, reflecting both the change in general public attitudes and the diminishing of the rural populace which held the animals at bay with surreptitious hunting. And if you’ve ever driven through Vermont, you might be shocked to know that one century ago most of the state was farmland, and the rich foliage that characterizes the state today is due to secondary growth as farmlands that were abandoned by Yankees because of competition from fertile large scale operations out in the middle of the country.
RE: Europe
A similar story ran in National Geographic last May about the US; as the Midwest depopulates, nature (and Indians!) refills the territory.
Maine, too, has forests where once were cows in fields. There is a word for a white pine which towers over surrounding hardwoods: a “pasture pine”: the only tree left when a pasture was cleared, left to provide shade for cows, now surrounded by a resurgent forest.
See also this paper,
Jesse H. Ausubel. The Great Reversal:
Nature’s Chance to Restore Land and Sea
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/great_reversal/
Even 40 years ago many of the bucolic (appealing to humans) landscape of fields and farms were giving way to second growth in Vermont. Most of the beautiful scenary, even of fall foliage, requires at least a foreground of fields so that you can see the panorama of distant trees.
What would England be if fully forested? Back to the Druids?
Personally, I would like for population levels worldwide to return to those characteristic of the 1500′s or so. That would mean that beautiful vistas in temperate lands would be limited, I’m afraid. But some especially beautiful human landscapes could be preserved by public means for artistic and cultural reasons.
I’d be astonished if England were “fully forested” as late as the Druids.