Author: Jeremy Cherfas

That it has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture! That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a report on the CABI blog about a study in the journal Biological Conservation. It reports a survey of “the general public” in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, which tried to discover what they knew about biodiversity. (I’ve pinched my headline direct from them.) You might think the Cairngorms are not a very agricultural place, but you would be wrong. There’s a great deal of farming up there, to say nothing of timber industries. And some of the conservation efforts seek to duplicate farming practices that have fallen by the wayside. But to hear CABI tell it, even though the survey included foresters and “farmer students” there seemed to be almost no understanding of how agricultural practices are part and parcel of landscapes and their ecology. Bah!