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Saturday, July 26, 2003


One of Earth-Info.Net's heroes is a man called Prof. Norman Myers...

Prof. Myers has made a huge impact in nature conservation and been responsible, along with Conservation International, for $500 million being directed towards 25 global biodiversity hotspots which merit urgent protection and have been identified on the basis of their species richness, endemism (uniqueness) + threat of destruction .

Prior to this method of priority setting being proposed + adopted, conservation effort had tended to be allocated in a rather ad hoc fashion according to where was available, subjectively selected or uncontroversial...

Prof Myers' books have also been very influential, including The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species, Perverse Subsidies: How Misused Tax Dollars Harm the Environment and the Economy + The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management... all of which have changed the way in which fundamental problems are viewed and tackled.

Excellent and thought provoking though all of these books are, Earth-Info.Net feels his photographs of African wildlife, taken in the 1950s, also deserve a mention... in particular this one of a leopard climbing a tree. Enjoy!

P.S. Monday 28th July: Prof. Myers + Sir Crispin Tickell (a former UK ambassador to the UN) have today written a comment piece for the Financial Times outlining why environmentalists and economists should find common cause in dismantling costly, outdated + damaging perverse subisides. Such subsidies encourage over production in the agricultural sector, the over-fishing of depleted fisheries, the burning of excessive fossil fuels + slow sectoral reform and innovation.


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