Forests

Saw the BBC2 feature this week about the Forest of Dean. A group of wild boar were filmed in the dusk. They are breeding there for the first time in 300 years or more.
Interesting because - put simply - the animals died out or were hunted to extinction at that time, when there were one tenth as many people as now. Yet now the boar live in forests in Sussex, in the most densely populated part of the country.
Obviously, they are not being hunted. But also, forests are not being utilised the way they were in the past.
There is no such thing as untouched, pristine forest nowadays, and there never was. Mediaeval woods were a resource for feeding animals and gathering firewood (by hook or by crook). The land was cleared of undergrowth by the villagers, and it became the greenwood of Robin Hood.
That process, perhaps, made the environment unsuitable for the wild boar.
It was similar in American forests; the native Americans cleared the ground by fire.
Beautiful environments are as much the product of mankind's intervention as they are the product of nature.