The biggest fantasy of all~

Something I'm musing about today... the thing that requires the greatest suspension-of-disbelief isn't elves or faeries, it's that there was a forest of more than three trees left standing together in the 18th century that wasn't someone's carefully maintained private hunting preserve. England was pretty well denuded by the time the Black Death came around in the 14th century. In the 17th century England deforested Ireland to build ships. A sad story, that. When the trees were gone Ireland was used for food production for the Navy during England's imperialist expansion. So much food was exported that many of the Irish were starving, and that was before the potato famine.
More about Ireland, if you want to know.

Concerns about the environment, about sustainability, scarcity of resources, and economic exploitation aren't a new idea at all. They have existed throughout history. I'm not writing to preach about them, but they're definitely a underlying theme.