Oliver Rackham

I think we're getting through this now as Rewilders and ecologists.

The debate is becoming more and more agreed, but historically we had famous ecologists like Oliver Rackham, who was a very famous academic who did much about woodland ecology.

And he famously wrote that before man deforested our land, a red squirrel would have been able to jump from John O'Groats all the way to Land's End in this closed canopy forest.

But this is a narrative and a sort of ecological position that we now think is not particularly representative of what we should have and what would have been here.