Yes, I read that and would suggest it was perfectly true. It's just what's happening. It was sad watching the stuff get dismantled under the Labour government and it has just continued under the Coalition. There is sufficient propaganda to cloud the issue - salmon returning to the northern rivers, for instance - but the Sixth Great Extinction continues apace.

And I'd say 'lock it'. A big turning point came when Cope admitted that he didn't follow the forums - it wasn't in those words, mind - in the interview with Mark Radcliffe. My bugbear has been a moderator that will not follow the site guidelines - that makes it cowboy town. An interesting aside is the crop circle forum - not Facebook - where members log in during the springtime and then, at the end of the summer, stop posting. It's still open during the winter but there's nobody posting there.

(I can see the merits of letting some things lie but I'm not sure if you yourself would just shrug about some criminal stuff. Take it from someone who has been there, you wouldn't).

As for both voluntary organisations and quangos "going native" and becoming an extension of government, I'm sure it's an occupational hazard - and a financial one if the piper is being paid by the government. You can see it happening in "our" sector. For years EH supported the idea of digging a vast trench across the Stonehenge landscape to create a cut and cover tunnel - because it was cheap and the government wanted it.

DEFRA's a funny one. They pay farmers a vast amount of European money not to cultivate strips around fields, to only plough to shallow depth, to maintain nature areas and protect archaeology. The latter is very much an afterthought and doesn't get sufficient attention from them IMO. But far worse, the European money may dry up. If that happens it will be a real disaster for both nature and archaeology.

The government, of course, will spin it - setting up a voluntary scheme that costs nothing and doesn't work and telling the world they're "empowering farmers to care" or some such Cameronspeak! ;)

Farming has inflicted great damage on the rarer birds that have been in decline these last 50 years or so but large species of mammals still survive, deer in great number, badgers and foxes. But it is the use of insecticides and fertilisers that destroy the flora, walk along any edge of a field or riverbank and the old wildflowers have disappeared to be replaced by nettles, etc.

I'm not sure about the so called environmental bodies that are there to protect, it seems to me that it is the individual that goes out to look after their own patch does more, and the article was quite right to state that the individual organisations are weak in their defence of the countryside, especially over the proposed forests takeover a few months back.

Problem is everything is beset with a subjectivity that is hard to get past, add class to the mix, nimbyism and of course outright greed and the battle becomes fraught. Yuo can rant at this government till the cows come home, but it was the electorate who put them there with all their manifold wishes for whatever...

http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2011/09/planning-turbines-countryside