Bravo to Bill Bryson

Renowned travel writer Bill Bryson has just become president of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. He writes an eloquent piece on why we should do more to protect our countryside in today's Guardian (did you know that only 12 per cent of Britain is now woodland? France has 28 per cent, Germany 32 per cent). Read it here, and then wonder why it takes an American to tell us what we should already know.

As an aside, as this government tells us we need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes every single year, thus eating up more of our countryside, it ignores the fact that there are nearly 700,000 homes that are empty. Many of these are second homes or holiday homes, and it begs the question - why do we in the western world consume so much with so little regard for anything else?