How sad to hear that Eagley Woods could be chopped down and eventually used for housing. We live in an interesting time, half the population want to save what we have; the other half want to make money out of it.

One questions which appeared in a Bolton News article was what can we do to save it? Well you can get your councillors involved, write to your MP, raise money for a barrister, push for a public inquiry by getting all your neighbours involved and collect 1000s of signatures, get the papers and television on your side, team up with others fighting a similar cause, become political and push the planning department.

However all this will count for nothing if you get it to a Public Inquiry and one individual who won’t live in Bolton, the Government Planning Inspector, decides it’s for the chop. This is how the system is run at present, most are given the go ahead.

Given that global warming is upon us it seems naive that permission can be given to take out hundreds of trees without first replanting and allowing them to grow so that they are producing as much or more oxygen.

When wildlife is displaced it does not move house, it dies out. Destroy the habitat and you risk destroying the species.

This type of thinking will not change as long as you have career politicians who see profit and stature above all else. This is why we have 7,000 species on the critical list out of 70,000 which live in the UK.

PETER GERMAN