The Barbary macaque Macaca sylvanus has been listed in the IUCN Red Data Book since 1975. This monkey is the only African non-human primate found north of the Sahara and the only member of its genus found outside Asia. It originally ranged throughout most of North Africa but its present and restricted distribution is the result of centuries of human interference and incursions into the once widespread primaeval habitats where it was common. It is now confined to a few pockets in Morocco and Algeria where it is threatened by further habitat destruction as well as hunting.

The long-sought decision made by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1982 to ban all commercial whaling after 1985 does not mean that conservationists can relax, confident of a safe future for the whales. The IWC was a source of anger or despair for conservationists for the first three decades of its existence according to Dr Sidney Holt who here describes its successes and failures, its reforms and near break-ups. It could, even now, if the 1982 decision is not upheld, preside over the near extinction of Bryde's and minke whales as it did of the blue and humpback whales. Dr Holt is hopeful for the future but insists that we must take the current threats to whales and seals seriously: pollution of several kinds; the unsound basis of scientific advice; commercial fisheries that regard some cetaceans as pests; and the utilitarianism that governs so many of our dealings with the natural world. He makes a plea for the preservation of these animals, not for their direct use to us as a source of food or foreign exchange, but because ‘they can gently and profoundly please us and help us know ourselves’. The following is a shortened version of the author's address to the Society at its AGM in October 1982; Dr Holt is Vice-Chairman for marine matters of IUCN's SSC, Marine Consultant to the ffPS and scientific adviser to the Seychelles delegations to IWC and CITES.

In 1979 there was only one national park in the forested Amazon region of Brazil. In that year Brazil adopted a conservation plan for the Amazonian region, proposed in 1976 as part of a system of conservation units for the whole country. Since then a further four national parks and a number of biological reserves and ecological stations have been established. The plan, which gives priority to ecosystem protection, takes the geographic diversity of plant species into consideration but not that of the fauna. The authors examine the effectiveness of the plan in protecting the primate families Callitrichidae, Callimiconidae and Cebidae and suggest how it could be adapted by recognising the importance of rivers, which limit the distributions of many primate species and subspecies as well as those of many other mammals, birds and plants.

Mahogany ranks as one of the world's finest timbers and it will probably be commercially extinct by 1990. The dramatic decrease in trade of true mahogany as well as a switch to previously untapped resources since the early 1970s reflects a general pattern of over-exploitation of tropical rainforests. The lack of mahogany cultivation and a move into other, unrelated mahoganylike, primary rain forest hardwoods, such as meranti and red lauan, emphasises an inevitable and irreversible decline for many hardwood forests. The authors give a summary of historical and current trade patterns in mahogany as part of a pilot study initiated and sponsored by ffPS in 1982.