Comment by macleginn
12 hours ago
A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.
A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of people closer to them to have a forest experience near their house.
Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.
Some of this is being slowly reverted:
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...
This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.
(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)