I thoroughly recommend The Land: an occasional magazine about land rights (rights here in the widest sense), whose current issue is devoted to trees and forests. Some articles can be found on their website, but for the bulk of it you need to pay £5, or, better still, support it with a modest £18 subscription for five issues.
I post a scan of the short editorial:
Those who might be impatient for a future issue on grass could meanwhile acquire a copy of Graham Harvey's The Forgiveness of Nature: the story of grass, which is also fascinating. All of his books repay reading.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has just published its first global asessment of the world's land resources.
It finds that most of the potential agricultural land is already being farmed. Of that, 25 percent is assessed as highly degraded, 8 per cent as moderately degraded, 36 per cent stable or slightly degraded and 10 per cent as improving. The degradation takes the form of soil erosion, water depletion and degration, and biodiversity loss.
The dramatic increases in agricultural yields brought about by the 'green revolution' begun in the 1960s have now tailed off and in part the very farming practices introduced by it have themselves resulted in the land and water resource degradation.
