“We grow up hearing stories about the dangers of the forest - in fairy tales, the forest is the place where the witches and wolves lurk, the place where little children get lost and get into trouble,” Lauren McMenemy, a south London-based writer of gothic-influenced folk horror who is currently working on a novel set in the world of the Victorian occult, told Bored Panda. She was happy to share some insights into our endearing fascination with deep dark woods, so scroll down to see what she said below.

“Forests and woodlands are full of intrigue; it's a totally different world to the urban life many of us now lead. When we see trees in cities, they are carefully placed in a curated landscape, often as a way to distract us from the concrete jungle we live in. In forests, though, nature rules,” McMenemy, who is a professional writer, journalist, and experienced writing coach, argues.

“It's wild, it's unruly, and anything could be lurking there. To a certain sort of personality, that is captivating,” she explained.

Meanwhile, in folklore and fantasy, forests represent places unknown, the place beyond the safety of home, McMenemy argues. “They are the liminal spaces - the spaces in between - where transformation can occur. Forests can be a place of threatening danger, or one of refuge, depending on the story.”

The writer continued: “There could be more to it than a warning, though; many pagan cultures are strongly connected to nature, and forests or woodlands were places of worship. Perhaps as Christianity spread, the tales of forest-dwellers became parables?”

“As humanity once again wakes up to the importance of nature to our lives and our climate,” McMenemy told us, “I fervently hope the forest becomes a sacred place again. There is so little true, thick woodland and forest left in the world, yet these are the places where our imagination comes alive,” she concluded.

Tragically, the world’s forests have been shrinking at an increasingly rapid rate since the last ice age. According to the data by the World Economic Forum, once humans figured out how to cultivate plants and livestock for regular sources of food, they needed land to use.

For centuries, the loss of greenery was relatively slow. By 1800, the world had lost 700 million hectares each of forest and grassland, replaced by around 900 million hectares of land for grazing animals and 400 million hectares for crops. But industrialization in the 1800s rapidly sped up the process.

While half of Earth’s loss of forests occurred from 10,000 years ago to 1900, the other half or 1.1 billion hectares have been lost since 1900. Part of this loss, about a whopping 100 million hectares, has occurred in the more recent time period of 2000 to 2018.

In that sense, humanity’s destruction of nature and ecosystems is a result of very recent population growth and increasing consumption. Experts have calculated that today, the world has lost one-third of its forests. Globally we deforest around ten million hectares of forest every year. That’s an area the size of Portugal every year. Around half of this deforestation is offset by regrowing forests, so overall we lose around five million hectares each year.