Bulldozers,  chainsaws and burning have removed more than 50 % of the world’s tropical forests. Why? For valuable  timber, mahogany and balsa; for food and biofuels, soybeans and palm oil; and to clear land for cattle and sheep. These are the crops and products we all desire and are others’ livelihoods, but progress need not be rapacious. There are economic patterns based on sustainable resource use–win/win approaches–that Nature and Culture has been able to introduce successfully.

Attempts to preserve biodiversity have traditionally been top down and rigid. Governments and international organizations circle areas on a map that they wish to conserve, often without examining the reality on the ground. That approach may work in the United States, Europe and Australia, but often fails in developing countries. The problem is that the poorest people in some of the poorest countries live next to the richest deposits of biological diversity in the world.

As E.O. Wilson has pointed out, “One Peruvian farmer clearing rain forest to feed his family, progressing from patch to patch as the soil is drained of nutrients, will cut down more kinds of trees than are native to all Europe.”