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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilya Maclean" data-source="post: 1533991" data-attributes="member: 46774">To be fair to the guy - I found out a bit more about him. He was a Senior National Parks Officer at North York Moors for a number of years before moving to Polytechnic South West in Plymouth, where he worked mostly on the dangers of bracken (<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117852.200-at-the-ba-rural-risks.html" target="_blank">see here</a>). He then took the first commercially sponsored chair in further education, funded by Rhone Poulenc Agriculture (<a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=99142&sectioncode=26" target="_blank">see here</a>), who in addition to manufacturing pesticides, also manufacture the most widely used bracken control agent, Asulox. He's authored or co-authored a small number of reports on the need to eradicate bracken and on agricultural systems, concluding for example that "conventional (as opposed to organic) arable regimes act effectively to maintain the impoverished status of biodiversity on arable land" (see <a href="http://orgprints.org/8088/01/OF0149_536_FRA.pdf" target="_blank">here</a> and references therein) and has been quite successfull at getting is stuff into the media. I still can't find anything properly scientific he's published. Of course, It would be libelous to state that someone with a track-record of commercially biased research and strong links to one of the world's largest manufacturers of pesticides might want to implicate other factors in farmland songbird declines so I'll leave you to make up your own minds....</blockquote>

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