‘The time is ripe to step up and expand current efforts to understand the great interlocking systems of air, water, and minerals, that nourish the Earth’, wrote Gilbert F. White (President of the International Council of Scientific Unions' Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) and Mostafa K. Tolba (Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme) in Environmental Conservation (Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 88,1979).

In the U.S.A. and other advanced countries, tribal peoples, together with other minorities, receive protection, their land-rights are respected, and reparations are being made for past violations. In the Third World there may be protective laws but, in practice, these are commonly ignored because it is profitable to do so. As a result, there is nothing to stop the present world-wide destruction of the environment in undeveloped regions— particularly of tropical forest—and the accompanying sociocide.

At present rates of destruction, pratically all existing natural tropical forests will have been cleared in 15–20 years' time, and catastrophic consequences are predicted. It is important to start using substitutes for raw materials emanating from forests—right now, while there still remain large forests and wild areas which can be saved. To aid this process it is proposed that a worldwide organization of timber producers should be formed along the lines of OPEC—to raise timber prices to true, i.e. replacement, costs—and that similar organizations should be formed for other raw materials. Such organizations could reduce environmental destruction without loss of income. Simultaneous with this, existing laws to protect tribal land-rights must be more vigorously enforced than hitherto, and new laws and institutions must be created where necessary to help slow the pace of destruction of tribal environments and societies.

The premise of an Amazonia full of immensely rich potentialities awaiting development to yield copious and abundant profit and lasting benefit, has only recently emerged as being tragically false. The most important environmental consideration in Amazonian discussions has been to convince the controllers of the enormous risks of the prevailing course of development.

People in Brazil and elsewhere who were concerned with various foreseeable dangers, intensified efforts to persuade the Government about them when the Transamazonian Highway programme was announced in June 1970. This programme, and the associated colonization scheme in 100-km strips on either side of the road network, subsequently was largely abandoned or postponed, as the harvests failed and roads deteriorated. The next development thrust—agro-industrial livestock—was even more damaging, and so the environmental movement in Brazil grew. Almost simultaneous announcements towards the end of the Geisel Government, of accelerated emancipation of Amerindians and risk-contracts to extract timber on unprecedented scales with no limit placed on area, were shelved with the change in government early in 1979 (cf. Schmithusen, 1978).

The world's remaining tropical forests are being destroyed so rapidly that, if current trends continue, by the end of this century only the most inaccessible relics will survive. This would be a major tragedy as it would mean, inter alia:

(i) Destruction of the way of life of the indigenous peoples who inhabit these areas, leading to their systematic pauperization and transformation into a ‘marginal’, largely unemployed and widely unemployable, proletariat having a miserable and precarious existence in the shanty towns surrounding already drastically overcrowded cities.

The Gola Forest (North), located on the eastern border of Sierra Leone with Liberia, at 7°30′–7°45′N latitude and 11°0′ – 11°15′E longitude, is the farthest extension northwards and westwards of the Congo-West African closed forest formation type. Its inaccessibility had prevented its exploitation during historical times, and this has resulted in its preservation as primary forest. Evidence from the structure, species composition, and microclimate, of unexploited forest enclaves such as the study site, show that the Gola Forest is different from the common mature secondary forests situated elsewhere in the country.

This is a comparative study of national park and related reserve policies and institutional arrangements in three hinterland areas undergoing rising pressure from mineral projects. The areas are the Canadian Northern Territories and Alaska (where interest lies in oil and gas exploitation) and the Australian Northern Territory (where the focus is on uranium extraction). Five elements of policy and institutional arrangements—management field, comprehensive planning and management, system planning, public inquiries, and uses—have been closely studied, with the following conclusions:

1. With respect to the management field, a major problem has been division of responsibility among federal and state or territorial agencies.

2. Overall comprehensive planning has not been seriously attempted in Canada and Australia, and has not yet met with success in Alaska.

3. A system planning approach provides rationale in Alaska and Canada, but is lacking in Australia.

4. Local comprehensive planning has been undertaken in the Kakadu National Park area of Australia, and a start has been made in this direction in Canada's northern Yukon.

5. Two uses, mining and native activities, pose special problems for national parks and related reserve policy, which is ambiguous on these issues in all cases.

6. All three systems represented by these parks in different countries are changing rapidly, and more suitable adaptive arrangements may be made for them in the coming years.

A consistently declining rate in the production of local foodstuffs has been noted in recent years in many third-world countries. One of the measures taken by the governments concerned in attempting to stop this alarming trend, has been the accelerated development of modern agricultural practices based on irrigation and the use of fertilizers.

Unfortunately, the environmental aspects have, too often, been overlooked in the development of modern irrigation programmes during the second half of the present century. This has, seemingly inevitably, resulted in a severe spread of water-borne diseases among people living in the areas that were so developed.

Spartina alterniflora is the dominant endemic saltmarsh angiosperm along the East and Gulf coasts of the United States. Dieback of S. alterniflora became evident through aerial surveys of the Lower Cape Fear Estuary of North Carolina. The areas affected varied in size, the largest being greater than 40 ha in areal extent. As S. alterniflora productivity losses can subsequently affect the productivity of the estuarine detritus-based food-web, studies were initiated in 1975 to examine the dieback phenomenon, follow successional trends, and determine the recolonization potential of S. alterniflora in dieback-affected salt-marshes.

Three S. alterniflora dieback sites in the Lower Cape Fear Estuary were selected for study. Two of the sites, both above mean high-water, were recolonized by Salicornia europaea, Distichlis spicata, Scirpus robustus, Spartina patens, and S. alterniflora. At a third site, found to be below mean high-water, all volunteer plants were of S. alterniflora. Final stabilization of all three sites was mainly by S. alterniflora, with the living standing-crop biomass ranging from 341 to 1,565 g/m2 in September of 1978.

Experimental plots within each of the three dieback sites were sprigged with S. alterniflora plants from three sources: (i) sandy dredge-material, (ii) volunteer plants within affected sites, and (iii) unaffected sites near the dieback areas. The success of these sprigs was strongly site-dependent. It is suggested that the plants used for revegetation of dieback sites should be obtained from areas similar to the site that is being transplanted and/or plants which have large rhizome systems.