the rainforests but to harvest the natural bounty within them. By exploiting the "green" movements and helping connect the indigenous people to the international markets, the conservation organizations have the means to impact the amount of rainforest which will be saved. Economics can provide the incentive to save the rainforest.
Saving the rainforests has become a celebrity cause; to do things which will save the rainforest from destruction by loggers and from the slash-and-burn techniques used by farmers to clear the land is politically and socially correct. At the forefront of this movement are nonprofit corporations. These nonprofit Corporations have been set up in the United States to market products and raw materials acquired from the rainforest in ways that can sustain production without harming the total biodiversity of the rainforest. These products are marketed to producers and consumers in the developed countries. To succeed in saving the rainforests, the economic consequences of setting aside large reserves of land from human intervention have to be taken into account. The populations of Latin America are growing, and economic poverty is rampant. The local people will continue to invade virgin rainforests and clear the land unless that land can be shown to be more valuable as intact forest than as farm land.
The destruction of tropical forests has long been a source of alarm to professional ecologists and environmental activists, and increasingly it has become a matter of public concern in Western industrial nations. Citizens of industrialized nations often respond to the issue of tropical deforestation with pedagogical or moral demands, and they treat the people of the tropics as a population that needs to be educated to the same level they themselves have reached so that those people will also want to protect the forests. One reason for this attitude is the perception that deforestation is the result of...