It was special to be able to meet so many people who really care about the woodland environments on which our entire planet, with all its creatures, so desperately depends.
These rich environments are vital to the purity of the water we drink, the air we breathe and soil in which we grow our food by converting millions of tons of toxic pollutants and carbon dioxide gases into oxygen.
Yet there remains a great chasm between the opinions of many local people and the short-term political ambitions of some politicians concerning how we protect our forests.
Our voice in Westminster has succeeded in persuading his political opponents to sign up to the notion that another supermarket here or another hotel there, even when the proposed building site is atop a fragile warren filled with dangerous gases, is more important than the water we drink and air we breathe.
It seems these people are focused purely on materialism, where everything is a commodity to market – the NHS, chemically-farmed produce, even the finite soils and woodlands of the Dean and other forest estates.
By selling off our public land ie, Birchwood around Coleford and Northern Quarter around Cinderford, other authorities can now follow this example.
I would ask again for local parties, especially Labour, to withdraw its bonds with the Conservatives in selling off our ancient forests.
I ask that they reassess the damage they are doing to the future of the forests and to the future of our planet.
History tells us that Foresters can be radical in their ways – as recently as 1981 and 2011 they never traded their principles.
It now appears that Labour councillors have gone into a huddle simply to enhance their own ambitions and careers.
The time has come to pull the rug from under this Conservative juggernaut that wants to chip away at our precious woodlands. Once the process is in place, the future of all public woodlands is at risk.
– Cllr Andrew Gardiner (Ind), Forest of Dean District Council, Lydbrook and Ruardean.