Abstract:
The professional conservation community is fighting a brave battle in the
tropics, but it is losing. And it will continue to lose, and thus everyone will
lose, unless there is a dramatic change in the number of participants on the
conservation side of the war. The library of Congress is being pulped while
we write and read our journals.
Our academic and research generation has the last chance to make the
difference. Many of us have had the privilege of seeing portions of the tropics
as it was and have experienced the pain of seeing it as it is; the next
generation will lack that perspective. If there is not a free and aggressive
infusion of new action, thought, and material resources into the war to save
tropical biodiversity, there will not be any tropiCS for the next generation
to argue about. The twenty-first century is less than 13 years away.
