From colleagues on three continents.

• Author: Veit, Peter
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

[on conservation as a social and political process]

Mac Chapin's "A Challenge to Conservationists" raises a number of important questions about current approaches to international conservation that deserve wide and open discussion. We thank the editor(s) of World Watch for having the foresight to provide a forum for such a dialogue. We wish to emphasize that, while the effort to understand biodiversity loss falls mainly within the realm of conservation biology, the process of slowing and hopefully reversing the decline sits predominantly in the human organizational realm. We thus want to emphasize the many key process-oriented issues that may be lost in the reaction to Chapin's article.

How shall we organize ourselves to both protect nature and promote human wellbeing? A number of...