The countries forests need your help to save them from exploitation. As Mountain bikers, forests are our playgrounds, we don’t want the vast majority of trail centers and visitor centers and all the planned developments to be completely obliterated for good. As the only real reason these trail and visitor centers exist is due to the previous government making it a legal requirement for all Forestry commission land to encourage people to visit the woods by providing trail centers etc. Unfortunately Private woodland, is as it says ‘Private’, so doesn’t have to let anyone in, you may have seen the sign ‘ tresspassers will be prosecuted’ before, well this could become common place at once open legal national forests where you might have ridden a properly crafted mountain bike trail.
Some people might say, ” They’ll still keep all the visitor centers open and running, they’d be daft not to? ” Unfortunately this isn’t the case as visitor centers, however nice and socially effective they are, probably aren’t the most cost effective use of a forest from a business point of view, as visitor centers are less profitable than intensive farming of trees etc, due to infrastructure and running costs etc. and often loose the forestry more money than they gain in a lot of cases.
YOU can do something about it, you can sign the petition online here, to get the government to think twice about this very irresponsible idea, it only takes a few minutes.
This is what the 38 degrees ‘Save our forests’ campaign has to say;
The government is planning a massive sell off of our national forests. They could be auctioned and fenced off, run down, logged or turned into golf courses and holiday villages.
We can’t let that happen. We need to stop these plans. National treasures like the The Forest of Dean, Sherwood Forest and The New Forest could be sold off. Once they are gone, they will be lost forever.
A huge petition will force the government to rethink its plans. If we can prove how strongly the public are against this, they will have to back down. Please sign the petition now.
Find out more: Visit the save our forests action centre to find out more about the forest sell off and download campaign leaflets and posters.
