Indeed, as an investigation of Central European alcoholic despair in temporary accommodation in Tasmanian rain forests it has a considerable, hypnotic power.

ECONOMIST: Fiction from Australia

It has rampaged eastwards into northern Alberta for the first time. (It has also made localised attacks on forests in all 11 western American states.) Scientists now fear the voracious beetle is about to invade the jack pines of the boreal forest, which could see the plague sweep across northern Canada to the Atlantic coast.

ECONOMIST: Pining for a cold winter

But the harm they do as a destroyer of habitat, by ripping up corals and sponges, and wrecking the nurseries of fish species that grow very slowly, seems out of proportion to any gain from scraping the ocean floor: one zoologist has compared it to cutting down virgin forests, full of rare species, to collect squirrels.

ECONOMIST: Marine conservation

The government has announced that it will not sell off publicly owned forests in England.

BBC: 'No sell-off' for public forests

Rwanda has said it will pull its troops out of eastern Congo if the genocidaires hiding in the forests there can be disarmed and rendered harmless.

ECONOMIST: A glimmer of hope

Not only have the good deeds of that wonderful molecule so essential to rain forests, begonias and plants that feed God's creatures been ignored, it has even come to be demonized as an endangering pollutant and climate-ravaging menace.

FORBES: Magazine Article

But the smell of the beech forests, the untamed West Coast beaches and the amazing clear air of the Deep South - it has to be the best in the world - made it all worthwhile.

BBC: New Zealand��s tracks less travelled