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WoodLots Book Review - December 2001
BOOK REVIEW: Professor Julian Evans reviews Ben Law’s book The Woodland Way – a Permaculture Approach to Sustainable Woodland Management
	Ben Law’s book is brimming with information and overflows from the heart. Ben is captivated by and committed to caring and managing woodland with attention to detail and traditional craft.  He writes well and this record of his experiences and accumulated skill and knowledge is a pleasure to read. Selecting from among the nine chapter titles (Woodlands from the Wildwood to 21st Century, Woodland Assessment and Management, Establishing Woodlands, and Woodland Management and the Law), along with nine appendices of data and addresses, suggest a practical manual of how to look after a woodland. This is true in part and much silvicultural knowledge is imparted, but The Woodland Way is not really a manual as such.  It is more an appeal or an advocacy urging the reader to manage woodlands in a certain, very environmentally sympathetic, way. And this is what I enjoyed about the book. Ben mixes politics, ecology, silviculture and a little propaganda to present a compelling case.  There are a few things I believe Ben has got wrong – there are not ‘plenty of pulp mills’ (p122) to buy low-grade hardwood, and I felt his antipathy to upland plantation forestry rather dated in the nature of his criticism.  As a fellow owner of a small wood, I could identify with much that I read, and I am full of admiration for chapter 7 ‘Food from the Woods’. Richer more delectable woodland-based recipes will be hard to find. The tables and figures in this chapter are so full of culinary delights that the book is almost worth buying for this alone.  The Woodland Way is well produced with numerous good quality black and white photographs and several colour. I have already referred to the many appendices, the one about planning issues is particularly useful, and there is a good index. Don’t buy this book expecting a comprehensive manual of practice, but buy it to learn of a genuinely alternative way of managing woodland. And buy it for the recipes!   If you are at all into small woodlands and sustainability this is a book for you - and for such it would be a delightful Christmas present.      Julian Evans  Julian Evans is Professor of Tropical Forestry at Imperial College and was formerly Chief Research Office at Alice Holt.  He chairs the Timber Growers Association’s Woodland Initiative. The story of his own small woodland in Hampshire is published as ‘A Wood of Our Own’.  The Woodland Way is available at Permanent Publications, Hyden House Ltd, The Sustainability Centre, East Meon, Hampshire, GU32 1HR. Tel: 01730 823311, Fax: 01730 823322, Email: info@permaculture.co.uk, Website: www.permaculture.co.uk Price £16.95, paperback, 256pp incl. 148 photos, ISBN  1 85623 009 0
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