1 The long-standing assertion that we would find solutions to all our problems has now been supplanted by a new humility, born of the realization that even our most astonishing achievements cannot offset this disastrous devastation of the earth, its plants and its animals. This important change of thinking was signalled by the production of the World Conservation Strategy, published in 1980, by IUCN, UNEP and WWF as a package for decision makers. It was a significant step towards changing the views of governments that our planet's resources were unlimited, and signposted the road that eventually led to the Rio Environmental Summit in 1992.
2 What the Strategy says, quite clearly, is that only by working with nature can our industrial culture survive; conservation is in the mainstream of human progress. We must recognize that we are a part of nature and must resolve that all our actions should take this into account. Only on that basis can the fragile lifesupport systems of our planet be safeguarded and our cultural development be sustained.
3 The World Conservation Strategy shows that development of the satisfaction of human needs, and the improvement of the quality of human life, depend upon conservation, and that conservation depends equally upon development. The Strategy aims to help advance the achievement of sustainable development through the conservation of living resources.
4 The World Conservation Strategy was prepared by IUCN and commissioned by UNEP, which together with WWF, provided the financial support for its preparation and helped to develop its basic themes. IUCN's membership of more than 450 government agencies and conservation organizations in over 100 countries were asked their views on conservation priorities. Two early drafts of the Strategy were sent for comment to IUCN members, and to the 700 scientists and other experts. This group were members of IUCN's Commissions on ecology, threatened species, protected areas, environmental planning, environmental policy, law and administration, and environmental education.
5 The final draft of the Strategy was submitted to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as well as to UNEP and WWF, and all four organizations reviewed it and made contributions to it.
6 Problems Of Consumerism
2 The biosphere is like a self-regenerating cake, and conservation is themanagement of our affairs so that we can have our cake and eat it too. Thismeans that certain bits of the cake must not be consumed, and consumption of therest of the rest must be kept within certain limits. Our global resource-cake willthen renew itself and provide for continuing consumption. For people to gain adecent livelihood from the earth without undermining its capacity to go onsupporting them, they must conserve the biosphere. This means doing three things:

1. Maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems whichsupport all life. Essential ecological processes range from globalphenomena such as the cycling of oxygen and carbon, to local ones, suchas the pollination of flowers by insects, or the dispersal of seeds by birds. Inbetween these are many processes essential for human survival and wellbeing,notably soil formation and protection, the recycling of nutrients, andthe cleansing of air and waters.All these processes are supported or strongly influenced by interdependentsystems of plants, animals and micro- organisms, together with non-livingcomponents of their environment such as forests and estuaries. The mainecosystems involved are the planet's life-support systems. These can be altered,sometimes greatly, provided the essential processes they support are notirreversibly impaired. The maintenance of these processes is vital for all societies,regardless of their stage of development. Many archaeological ruins of greatcivilizations and small peasant villages, testify to the consequences of not doing so

2. Genetic diversity must be preserved to maintain the range of variationpresent in the world's organisms: species, subspecies, varieties, strains andforms of plants animals and micro-organisms. Some of this variation maynot be essential to our future needs, but we know that a great deal is vitalto sustain and improve agricultual production. Present needs include thepresent food and fibre production through breeding programmes for crops,livestock, trees, forage plants and so on. We also need to keep open futureoptions for changing our production system. Natural diversity is alsorequired to provide a buffer against harmful environmental change, and tosupply raw material for medical and scientific innovation, forpharmaceuticals, and for the many industries that use living resources.The preservation of genetic diversity is a vital form of insurance andinvestment. It requires the prevention of the extinction of species and thepreservation of as much of the variation within species as possible. Many speciesare highly variable, occurring in many different forms. The continuing availabilityof these different forms is of great importance to human welfare. This can beillustrated by two examples. The first concerns reserpine, a very effective drug inthe treatment of hypertension. Reserpine comes from several species ofserpentwood or Rauvolfia, plants growing in the tropical forests of Asia, Africaand the Americas, of which the most important today is African serpentwood.

Most of the plants are collected from the wild, and it has been found that plantsgrowing in one place may be much more effective than those growing elsewhere.

For example, there is ten times more reserpine in serpentwood in Zaire than thereis in neighbouring Uganda.

The second example shows that a valuable variety may at first beoverlooked because it lacks obviously desirable characters. A variety of wheatcollected in Turkey was ignored for15 years because it seemed so unpromising: itwas thin- stemmed and collapsed in bad weather; it seldom survived the rigours ofwinter but it could not be persuaded to grow quickly enough for it to be plantedlate. Moreover, if it did survive to be harvested, its flour baked poorly. Suddenlystripe rust (a wheat disease) became serious in the USA and anxious farmerssought help. It was discovered that the apparently useless Turkish varietyhappened to be resistant to four kinds of stripe rust as well as to two otherproblem diseases. It is now used in all wheat breeding programmes in the northwesternUSA; and improved varieties based on it are saving millions of dollarsevery year in reduced losses to disease.

3. We must utilise species and ecosystems sustainably. That is to say weshould utilize species and ecosystems in amounts and in ways that allowthem to go on renewing themselves for all practical purposes indefinitely.

The main species groups and ecosystems concerned are fisheries, and otherwildlife that enters trade from the cropping of forests and seminaturalgrazing lands. The importance of ensuring that utilization of an ecosystemor species is sustainable, varies with a society's dependence on the resourcein question. For a subsistence society, sustainable utilization of most, if notall, its living resources is essential. Sustainable use is equally important fora society (whether developing or developed) with a 'one crop' or 'few crop'economy, depending largely on a particular living resource (for example,the fishing communities of eastern Canada are now extinct because of overfishing).

The greater the diversity and flexibility of the economy, the lessthe need to utilize certain resources sustainably, but by the same token theless the excuse not to.

1 Conservation is a matter both of respect for life and of making life easier bydiscovering and living by ecological rules. But it is also something much morebasic and urgent. Already for at least half of the world's population conservation isnow a matter of life and death. People such as the peasant farmers, fishers, herdersand hunters who make up about three-quarters of the populations of developingcountries, and people everywhere who suffer from diseases whose treatmentdepends on drugs of natural origin, are immediately vulnerable to resourceimpoverishment.

2 The dependence of rural communities on nature and its resources is also directand immediate. For the 500 million people who are malnourished, or the 1,500million people whose only fuel is wood, dung or crop wastes, or the 800 millionpeople with incomes of $50 or less a year, conservation is the only thing betweenthem and at best abject misery, at worst death. So it is for the millions of peoplesuffering from diseases that are relieved by drugs from plants, animals andmicroorganisms.

3 Ultimately, conservation is a life and death matter for everybody. The air webreathe and the soil in which we grow food are the products of living organisms.Without plants, animals and microbes, people would not exist.

4 The way to sustainable development is to invent and apply patterns ofdevelopment that also conserve the living resoures essential for human survival andwell-being. Conservation is often thought of and treated as a specialized, andsomewhat limited activity, but in fact it is a process that cuts across and must beincorporated into all human activities. For this to be achieved, each of us will haveradically to re-orientate our view of the world and of our place and role in it.

Meanwhile. it is urgent that conservation and development be fully integrated toensure that, in our quest for a higher quality of life, we protect those parts of thebiosphere that need protecting and modify the rest only in ways that it can sustain.

For this we need a world conservation strategy.