Biodiversity conservation : whose resource? whose knowledge? / edited by Vandana Shina

In an increasingly crowded world with widely differing community interests and vulnerabilities, development and management of natural resources calls for a most balanced approach sensitive to long-term interests of local and regional communities as well as to life on earth as a whole. This principle is all the more vital today as we proceed to colonise every available ecological niche on earth to the point of destabilizing their delicately balanced interdependent structures, thereby triggering adverse irreversible environmental changes and exposing whole populations to new risks.

In order, however, to uphold this principle against attrition by narrow powerful interests and expediency, we constantly need to draw upon the analytical-experimental culture of science. For only by objectively discerning the critical issues involved in a development plan and illuminating the implications of multiple solutions to these issues by established knowledge and scientific methods of analysis, can we ever hope to keep alive the sensibility of society at large so that rational and equitable judgement can be arrived at in choosing a judicious course of action.

The INTACH series on Science in Public Policy is aimed at enhancing transparency and public visibility of the critical issues involved in important matters of public policy, and the extent to which these can be resolved through analysis and informed debate.