‘The time is ripe to step up and expand current efforts to understand the great interlocking systems of air, water, and minerals, that nourish the Earth’, wrote Gilbert F. White (President of the International Council of Scientific Unions' Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) and Mostafa K. Tolba (Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme) in Environmental Conservation (Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 88,1979).

In the U.S.A. and other advanced countries, tribal peoples, together with other minorities, receive protection, their land-rights are respected, and reparations are being made for past violations. In the Third World there may be protective laws but, in practice, these are commonly ignored because it is profitable to do so. As a result, there is nothing to stop the present world-wide destruction of the environment in undeveloped regions— particularly of tropical forest—and the accompanying sociocide.

At present rates of destruction, pratically all existing natural tropical forests will have been cleared in 15–20 years' time, and catastrophic consequences are predicted. It is important to start using substitutes for raw materials emanating from forests—right now, while there still remain large forests and wild areas which can be saved. To aid this process it is proposed that a worldwide organization of timber producers should be formed along the lines of OPEC—to raise timber prices to true, i.e. replacement, costs—and that similar organizations should be formed for other raw materials. Such organizations could reduce environmental destruction without loss of income. Simultaneous with this, existing laws to protect tribal land-rights must be more vigorously enforced than hitherto, and new laws and institutions must be created where necessary to help slow the pace of destruction of tribal environments and societies.

Rational use and conservation of living resources must be the active concern of all of us, rich and poor alike, if the world is to continue to develop in any reasonable degree of harmony with Nature. Accordingly it is necessary to recognize that industrial—and even some degree of demographic—development is not necessarily incompatible with environmental protection, and indeed that, in the world to come, conservation and development will have to be widely interlinked.

Cognizant of this and of the fundamental need to protect and perpetuate living, renewable resources in the face of ever-mounting and demanding human populations, and stressing the imperative of preserving a holistic approach to these problems of Man's and Nature's ‘only one Earth’, IUCN, with the support of UNEP and WWF, and the endorsement of some other bodies, launched, early in 1980, after several laborious redraftings, a ‘World Conservation Strategy’, in the manner described in the last part of this paper. It sets a policy for all to follow, taking mankind well away from the merely reactionist basis of conservation.

The premise of an Amazonia full of immensely rich potentialities awaiting development to yield copious and abundant profit and lasting benefit, has only recently emerged as being tragically false. The most important environmental consideration in Amazonian discussions has been to convince the controllers of the enormous risks of the prevailing course of development.

People in Brazil and elsewhere who were concerned with various foreseeable dangers, intensified efforts to persuade the Government about them when the Transamazonian Highway programme was announced in June 1970. This programme, and the associated colonization scheme in 100-km strips on either side of the road network, subsequently was largely abandoned or postponed, as the harvests failed and roads deteriorated. The next development thrust—agro-industrial livestock—was even more damaging, and so the environmental movement in Brazil grew. Almost simultaneous announcements towards the end of the Geisel Government, of accelerated emancipation of Amerindians and risk-contracts to extract timber on unprecedented scales with no limit placed on area, were shelved with the change in government early in 1979 (cf. Schmithusen, 1978).

The opportunity of agriculture to use, during the last three to five decades, abundant and cheap sources of fossil-fuel energy, has enabled farmers to enjoy an extraordinary growth of output in developed countries and in some sectors of the Third World. Unfortunately this technical revolution has not had wholly beneficial effects: pushed to its extreme it is detrimental to the environment, creates little new employment, and can even increase unemployment. Moreover, it is by no means always adapted to the needs of the hundreds of millions of poor farmers and landless labourers in the Third World, and henceforth the emerging energycrisis will surely question the wisdom of pursuing this agricultural technology.