The Latest Enviro-scam – ‘Celtic Rainforests’

I ended last week’s piece on the purchase by Tir Natur of land in the Elenydd, the beautiful ‘wilderness’ between Lampeter and Llanwrtyd, by saying that I was waiting for further information on what was planned to have been the second part of that offering.

Well, I’ve since had a response from the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’, but it’s not entirely satisfactory. More on that in part two. But first . . .

TIR NATUR AND ‘CELTIC RAINFORESTS’

I pointed out last week that the land bought by Tir Natur, is in the Cwm Doethïe-Mynydd Mallaen Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Which means it is already protected, and in the care of Natural Resources Wales (NRW).

That being so, why does it need ‘rewilding’? Well, I have since learnt that this SSSI is one of four sites in Wales already appearing on the Celtic Rainforests (Wales) website. (Maybe someone should tell them that ‘Snowdonia’ is now Eryri.)

So why isn’t the rainforest aspect mentioned on the Tir Natur website?

Of the others, Eryri is of course a National Park; Elan Valley is owned or managed by Dŵr Cymru; and Cwm Einion (aka ‘Artists Valley’) is another SSSI that runs up behind Ffwrnais in north Ceredigion.

Which means that all four sites so far chosen for restoration to their imagined pristine state of ‘Celtic Rainforest’ are under some form of public agency control. So why can’t the bodies involved do the work themselves?

Perhaps I’ve given the game away in the title to this week’s piece. The Celtic Rainforest baloney is just another way for ‘environmentalists’ to grab land, and for big business to make money.

Checking the background of Celtic Rainforests I ran across this advertisement put up by Wildlife Trusts Wales (WTW). This is the name of a body that abolished itself on 31 March 2021. So it has no official registered or regulated standing

Before that date the individual Welsh Trusts had been represented by WTW in dealings with the Englandandwales Wildlife Trusts (WT). Now they belong directly to WT, just like English county Trusts.

Attributable to the almost complete absence of Welsh involvement in ‘Welsh’ wildlife trusts.

Getting back to the Celtic Rainforests, The manager vacancy was filled by Gethin Davies, who also works for Parc Eryri. Which, if nothing else, explains why the project is based at the Park’s HQ in Penrhyndeudraeth.

Anyway, seeing as this land bought by Tir Natur is already a SSSI, and is to be planted with native trees, how much rewilding will actually happen? Or does planting trees count as rewilding?

To finish this section let me introduce one of Celtic Rainforests volunteers, who believes, ” . . . systemic racism is built into the way we view and use land; how it’s parcelled up and managed.”

For someone I can confidently locate on the political left she’s strangely blind to the class dimension to land ownership. Instead, she prefers a more simplistic, black and white interpretation. Literally! White people bad, everybody else good.

This Rainforests volunteer condemns colonialism but seems blind to a ruling group’s middle class, aligned with corporate capital and serving Globalist aims, working against an indigenous ethno-cultural minority.

Are there any depths of idiocy this anti-white bullshit can’t plumb? Perhaps not; for to believe a US academic this week, drinking cows milk makes you a Nazi.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at NYU, criticized The Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on January 14. In a blog post, Caplan claimed that whole milk has been used as a symbol by white supremacists.

As you can guess, I’ve had a gutsful of this nonsense. Despite being difficult to take it seriously at times it’s still racism. It must be called out and defeated.

But of course, in this context, it’s another weapon in the anti-farming arsenal.

RHOS-FARCH, PENNAL

If the name sounds familiar it’s because I wrote about this farm in July last year, in the piece, ‘Farming’ – The Globalist Way!’. So this is by way of an update.

Last July I told you it was suspected that Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust had bought Rhos-farch, a farm of 625 acres overlooking the historic village of Pennal. Here’s how Savills describes the holding.

And here’s a map to help you further. Rhos-farch is coloured in pink.

I can now confirm that Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust (MWT) received £3,000,000 to buy Rhos-farch. Certainly, that’s what’s suggested in the accounts. The clip below says the money came from Aviva via the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts.

Note “restore it to Celtic Rainforest“. This is the reason for the funding.

But that clip above also says that Rhos-farch will be “open to visitors as a MWT nature reserve“. We can almost guarantee that some visitors will get lost, or think the nature reserve extends over neighbouring farms.

Seeing as Savills had priced the property at £3,500,000 I wondered if MWT had received money from anywhere else. So I wrote to the self-styled ‘Welsh Government’, asking if any money had come from that quarter.

The answer was no. But I was sent copies of email correspondence, from last summer, between interested parties. Despite redactions we can assume the ‘Welsh Government’ was a participant, if only because it was holding the copies.

Other participants that can be clearly identified from the emails are Wildlife Trusts Wales (conduit for the Aviva money), and the Celtic Rainforest Creation Manager (Wales). Confirming that even though Rhos-farch is not mentioned on the Rainforests website it is obviously lined up.

The wildlife trust’s purchase is not welcomed by locals. Certainly not by local farmers.

One reason for that is the farms in the area, including Rhos-farch, benefit from a local shoot, a useful addition to their income. Of course, Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust will not allow shooting, and this will impact negatively on other farms.

The issue even got an airing in Nation.Cymru last year, which reported retirees and good-lifers trying to impose their views on locals. The giveaway was the paragraph beginning, “I was upset when moving here that there seemed to be an us and them atmosphere in the village.”

(Of course it never occurs to these buggers to ask how this division arose.)

Thankfully, the answer came later in the piece:

I and all my family are Pennal born and bred, and it winds me up terribly that incomers want to change our way of life and also tell us what we can and can’t do. If all the anti shooting brigades in the village don’t like what we do in the countryside, maybe they should move back to where they came from.

I find it interesting that Nation.Cymru should run this article around the same time as the emails I’ve mentioned were being exchanged. And perhaps as the Rhos-farch sale was being finalised. But N.C is extremely well connected in Corruption Bay.

Though seeing as Rhos-farch is not mentioned on the Celtic Rainforests website, how many other farms, other sites, are being lined up?

One final thought. Rhos-farch was never in Montgomeryshire, or Powys. It was in the old county of Merioneth, now in Gwynedd. So why was it bought by the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust?

Is it because the vendors, one of them a senior ‘Welsh Government’ civil servant, live in the old county of Montgomeryshire?

CONCLUSION

If it was simply about preserving and perhaps enhancing rainforests, then I’d be fine with that. We could ban felling, clear the rhododendrons and other invasive species, plant more trees – and then leave it to Nature.

Given that the rainforests I know locally are typically dark, dank places, steep slopes and narrow valleys, no good land would be lost and no one would be inconvenienced.

And the website agrees with me.

You are never far from the sound of cascading water, and with the huge boulders and ravines galore, these forests are an ideal place for adventures.

Adventures“?

That description also tells us these sites are unsuitable for the grazing that is constantly advocated! Though bear in mind that what these areas might have known in the past was not the right kind of grazing.

For that’s how it works when ‘environmental’ arguments are used against Welsh farming. It starts with dreaming up ways to make money, grab land – and then comes the excuse.

Step 1: Think of imaginative ways to achieve the objective.

Step 2: Dream up a ‘problem’ to justify what you’ve decided on.

Deception is the essence of the ‘climate crisis’; responsible for Net Zero impoverishing the West through ruinous electricity bills that drive industry away and make life more difficult for ordinary people.

Feeding off this prime lunacy are associated disorders such as the ‘threat’ from CO2! All too predictably, this is one of the justifications used for the Celtic Rainforests scheme.

It should go without saying that the World Economic Forum (WEF) is to the fore in connecting trees with corporate money-making.

Pushing the same message on the UK level is the Climate Change Committee. Here’s an extract from a CCC report on Wales published less than a year ago.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere“! Life on Earth depends on carbon dioxide. Remove it, and everything – including we humans – dies.

Seeing as we’re talking of rainforests it’s worth remembering that this all started decades ago, in attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, and the rainforests of south east Asia. But more recently, someone realised it could be brought nearer home and used in the Globalist-environmentalist war on farming.

And remember! “Just 4.3% of the entire rainforest landscape is ancient woodland“, says the State of Wales Rainforest Report (page 8). So plenty of room to expand. Plenty more farms to buy.

And who’ll decide what must be ‘restored’? A fair question – because most of Wales qualifies as “Rainforest Zone”.

The map comes from an article in Nation.Cymru in October 2022. It seems to be attributed to Guy Shrubsole, whose name crops up a lot in such discussions. The article even names the Elenydd.

Shrubsole is said to have founded Right to Roam, a gang of self-entitled narcissists who feel they have the right to traipse wherever they damn well please. Among their number we find the ‘racist countryside’ woman we encountered earlier.

In conclusion . . . I often watch Neil Oliver’s monologues on YouTube. Neil’s persona non grata with the Beeb for challenging Covid, climate change, and all the other lies. He rambles a bit, and he’s not always right, but he’s a sincere guy.

Anyway, and as Neil Oliver always says: “It’s never about what they say it’s about“.

How true that is. Bear it in mind.

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© Royston Jones 2026

Buy Me A Coffee

The myth of temperate forestation as viable sequestrate of carbon dioxide

This is a guest post by Brychan Davies

 

Global warming is a reality, as is global cooling. Throughout geological time, and throughout the history of mankind there is a natural variance in global temperatures. Geological variance is caused by variations in the tilt of the earth, the polarity switching, and continental drift. The variation on the historical timescale is caused by natural variance in oceanic currents, volcanic activity, and natural oscillations and cyclic proliferation of flora and fauna. Global warning, global cooling is not new. It is part of the natural condition of planet Earth.

Greenhouse Effect

The best example of ‘the greenhouse effect’ is on the planet Venus. A thick soup of acidic water vapour and carbon dioxide ‘traps’ the suns energy and global temperatures are scorching, with an average surface temperature of 300c. The opposite effect can be found on Mars, where the atmosphere which is 95% carbon dioxide but so sparse there is little effect on the atmosphere where global temperatures of –60c. Earth is in the ‘Goldilocks zone’, and naturally oscillates about halfway between these extremes. The mix of naturally fluctuating atmospheric carbon dioxide, and water vapour plays a role in the global temperature.

Fossil Fuels

All coal, oil and fossil fuels on earth was once atmospheric carbon dioxide. In fact the main coal deposits on earth are as a result of carbon dioxide sequestration, 300 million years ago, during the ‘carboniferous’ era. This is the carbon dioxide released back into the atmosphere during the current industrial period, and it is claimed to have a dangerous effect on global warming.

Forestation

It is also claimed that if we now plant trees on land currently used for grazing animals we can mitigate this effect. Is it true?

Well, no. The issue of global warming, and the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide was first identified in the early 1990s and proposals to try to manage this on a global scale was in Japan, in 1992, and it became known as the Kyoto Protocol. Coincidentally, Japan is an ideal comparison with the British Islands, both being of a temperate seasonal climate, with a modern industrial heritage, similar moderation of seasons by oceanic currents, and similar natural forests, a mixture of native coniferous forest at elevation and to the north, with a natural forest of deciduous woodland on the main landmass, with natural shrub and grassland at elevation.

Saikai Forest near Nagasaki. Click to enlarge

Japan, both fortunately and unfortunately, has the advantage of having 75 years worth of continuous scientific study of re-forestation. It arose after a nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki towards the end of WWII. It’s a port city very similar in size to Swansea, surrounded by an area of agricultural land on a peninsular, and a backdrop of moderate uplands, and a self-contained river system.

The bomb resulted in all this being taken out of productive use and a programme of forestation initiated, whose purpose at the time was to soak up nuclear contamination. It is the most intensively studied area of temperate reforestation in the world and has been studied for over 75 years. One particular measure being the sequestration of atmospheric carbon to measure ‘dilution’ of nuclear isotopes, but also provides empirical data on the seasonal sequestration of carbon dioxide as well as a net figure by different tree species over the 75 year period.

The key graph is shown below.

Click to enlarge

CO2 sequestration

Tonnes per hectare per year.

Nineteen-sixty-eight was an important year. It was when the forest changed from being a carbon sink to a net carbon emitter. It related to the age of the trees and the natural eco-system. Mature trees decay, this is when the action of fungi, and other parasitic flora and fauna which consumes the wood, leaf litter, and soils, emitting carbon dioxide in quantities greater than that being absorbed by the tree through photosynthesis.

Tadaki, Y.; Hachiya, K. Forest Ecosystems and Their Productivity; Ringyo Kagakugijutsu Shinkosho: Tokyo, Japan, 1968. (In Japanese)

Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol committed participants to financing measures to tackle carbon dioxide emissions. The United States blamed the rest of the world, suggesting the issue is in the Amazon, the European Union spent cash on changing agriculture with set-aside schemes, and this has now morphed in the United Kingdom to ‘blame the farmers’. Japan, however, took a more scientific approach and launched satellites to measures their forestation, launched a programme of study to measure carbon sequestration of a forestation programme, and was able to use data previously obtained (1968 tipping point) to give real numbers to the subject.

Estimation of CO2 Sequestration by the Forests in Japan by Discriminating Precise Tree Age Category using Remote Sensing Techniques” – 2015.

The reality is that a newly planted forest does act as an initial carbon sink, but only until the forest reaches maturity. Both show that net gains are negligible after 75 years, although there’s an earlier peak with coniferous forest in comparison to deciduous forest. Gains then become losses. The report is here.

The study concludes with: “The CO2 amount and other important information revealed in this study has provided important data. Do old mature trees sequestrate as much as younger trees? The answer is no when we see the trend of the sequestration as a function of tree age.” Kotaro Iizuka, Ryutaro Tateishi et al.

Wales

So what lessons can we draw on forestation as a method of sequestrating carbon dioxide in Wales? Mass forestation is not the answer. There is flora that does the job – peat bogs. This is where the acidity of the soil does not allow decomposition of vegetation and the result in layer upon layer of peat deposits. To maintain this ground cover, the light grazing of animals is needed, like sheep, to prevent the ingress of trees.

Questions

Why plant forests and remove farmers from the land when doing so has an adverse effect on carbon dioxide sequestration? Why is there an obsession with projects like the ‘Tetrapak Financed Summit to Sea’ project when there is clear scientific evidence that its objective cannot be met by its proposals? If there are short term gains prior to clear felling at sequestration tipping point, why isn’t this a purely commercial proposal? Why use upland grazing land that is already a net carbon sink for projects that scientifically are known to be inferior?

Additional abstract

There is a myth that the large areas of treeless uplands that exist in Wales and the rest of Britain is a ‘man made landscape’ and planting trees in these areas is a form of ‘rewilding’. This is utter nonsense. There is clear scientific evidence that much of upland Britain has been treeless for the last 4000 years, and this is proved by pollen analysis of peat cores. After the last ice age, there were significant natural cyclic oscillations climatic change – dry Boreal, wet Atlantic, dry Sub-boreal, wet Sub-Atlantic. This eradicated almost all upland forestation long before any impact of human activity.

Nant-y-moch from Pumlumon. Click to enlarge

In fact there is ample evidence that forestation in in the 1970s of these areas has caused significant degradation of the diversity of wildlife, the erosion of upland peat deposits, and the net release of sequestrated CO2. There are is currently 589 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere. The current store of carbon in peat deposits is over 600 gigatonnes. Large scale forestation of upland Wales will result in a significant net release of carbon into the atmosphere, and significantly add to global warming.

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