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LETTER TO THE EDITOR: SCB AND SUSTAINABLE GROWTH

The editorial Economic Growth, Biodiversity Conservation, and SCB [SCB Newsletter 12(4):10, 12] and responses [SCB Newsletter 13(1):1, 11-12] continues to stimulate discussion.

Dear Editor,

The recent exchange on sustainable growth highlights why conservation biology has failed to be relevant in today's society and to resource management issues. The need, or even the hope, we could or should maintain some sort of steady state economy is a complete fallacy. Any steady state in nature merely reflects too short a time frame on the part of the observer, and who can really advocate stopping economic development when half the world still lives on $2 a day? Resource management decisions need to be based on better long term economic and social impacts. Environmentalists have failed to define long term impacts of decisions that are driven by short term gains for a select few. Conservationists will continue to be sidelined in the decision making processes until we drop the rhetoric about good growth versus bad growth and learn to more accurately identify costs and benefits to our and future generations.

The challenge is immense, but the stakes of not developing better decision making tool are even greater.

Daniel Evans
U.S. Agency for International Development
Mexico City, Mexico
DEvans@terra.com.mx

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