Editorial

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.