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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CPBell" data-source="post: 2057525" data-attributes="member: 85682">We tend to think of the situation that prevailed when we were children as being ‘natural’, but that’s just a problem of our own subjectivity. A moment’s reflection is sufficient to remind us that the British Isles has no natural habitats to speak of, in the sense of being unaffected by human activity. The abundance and diversity of species at any point in time, and the changes that happen as time passes, are all occurring within a man-made environment. They are therefore always ‘unnatural’ in a sense, even though the underlying ecological processes are the same as would occur in habitats untouched by human activity, subject as they still are to natural perturbations and the resulting disequilibria. The salient question is how the environment is to be managed for biodiversity, and whether we base policy on evidence, no matter how inconvenient, or instead allow our judgment to be either clouded by sentiment or skewed by calculation.</blockquote>