This, the title of Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier’s paper in Scientific American, embodies in some ways, what this website is all about. Certainly not the first researchers to conclude that people will only value biodiversity if it has direct implications for their own well-being (economic prosperity, health, longevity, etc.), Kareiva and Marvier’s paper nicely summarises, however, the extent to which conservation research MUST quantify these links. The corollary is that if we don’t, conservation research will pass into oblivion (along with the species we are attempting to protect from extinction). Nice paper, and certainly one to watch.
Sydney’s 1789 smallpox epidemic came from the First Fleet and killed up to 220,000 Indigenous Australians
Hulton Archive / Getty Images We warn readers that the content of this study is confronting and may be distressing. In April 1789, the first smallpox epidemic among Aboriginal people in the Sydney region began, just 16 months after Europeans arrived on the First Fleet. Little is known of the true scale of the epidemic,…










Erik Meijaard, adviser for The Nature Conservancy‘s forest program in Indonesia, posted an interesting essay on this subject entitled: Conservation For Us. Check out his blog on this and related issues here.
CJA Bradshaw
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