The Zoo that Is Not: Education for Conservation

The conservation of the earth's biotic resources has become a matter of extreme urgency. At the root of our present problems lies our unique capacity to change habitats on a large scale. No other animal can do this. But we did not start off affecting the world profoundly; our capacity for massive environmental effects is strikingly recent in terms of our evolutionary history. We, the naked apes, Homo supiens, were ecologcally indistinguishable from any other animal until we domesticated animals and plants. For 99 percent of our species life, as hunter-gatherers, our populations were limited to the natural carrying capacities of unaltered habitats. With the domestication of plants and animals the long period of ecological innocence ended. We fell heavily on the forests and savannas. Our gross alteration of biological systems to increase our food resources created the conditions necessary for civilization, the development of science and technology, and our subsequent and presently phenomenal population growth. Since we took that pivotal step beyond mere subsistence, just 1 percent of our life as a species ago, we have radically altered large areas of the earth's surface. The results of our tewapernicious activities are discernable from outer space; we are no longer, ecologically speaking, an animal species. The transformation started slowly and has only accelerated mightily in the last millenium. Even during most of that time, most of our environmental manipulations have been confined to the temperate and Mediterranean regons. The present great transformations in the topics originated principally in the second half of the twentieth century, in the postcolonial period. In parallel with the destruction has been a modest expansion in biological research in the tropics. From this research it is now abundantly clear that the rain forests, in the broad sense, are home to the overwhelming majority of living species. We know with certainty that as a result of the expanding conversion of tropical forests we now face threats to biodiversity greater than those occurring at any previous stage in the history of human perturbations of the environment. The driving force of these changes is an interlinked system of economic "development" and population growth. This is powered by an intense drive toward the betterment of living standards by tropical peoples. The situation is critical, we are close to passing the point of no return, and some crucial questions inevi-