[seer]

Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example.

I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.

Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.

There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.

For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.

To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.

[macleginn]

A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.

[adrianN]

A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of people closer to them to have a forest experience near their house.

[macleginn]

Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.

[oblio]

Some of this is being slowly reverted:

https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...

[macleginn]

This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.

(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)