People living in towns and cities are dominating the environmental debate and overlook the opinion of rural dwellers, a leading botanist has said.
Sir Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, said the urban view of the natural world was often at odds with the issues facing people living in rural areas.
Sir Peter made his comments in a speech to delegates at the International Media and Environment Summit (Imes) in Kuching, Malaysia.
"Forests in and around cities are disproportionately important," he said. "They colour the view that city dwellers have on the natural world as more people live in cities, they set the agenda."
This was particularly evident in the US, he said, where states in the mid-West are currently suffering from what he termed a "plague of deer".
Culling the deer was unpalatable to urban voters so the animals had been allowed to expand beyond their natural populations, Sir Peter argued.
"Many of the ecological processes that sustained forests in the past... no longer function at all."
He gave one example as being forest fires in North America that are routinely extinguished, despite being natural events that are needed to create new growth.
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