Misguided Tompkins.

• Author: de Queiroz, Joao S.
• Position: FROM READERS - Letter to the Editor

While I admire the Tompkins's intentions and efforts to conserve biodiversity ["Buy Now, and Save!" July/August 2005], I find their approach economically inefficient and politically naive. As Frank Zeller indicates in his article, the Tompkins's purchase of large tracts of land for conservation has raised suspicions in Chile, a relatively developed country with moderate population pressure. Such an approach would be untenable in most regions of the humid tropics where forested areas have been the home of indigenous peoples for thousands of years. In these cases, contrary to the "pay people to go away" proposition espoused by the Nature Conservancy associate from Chicago, it is more effective and politically tenable to pay the indigenous owners to stay put and help them conserve the biodiversity that benefits us all than to bring in outsiders to protect privately owned biodiversity. In fact, paying people to go away is what the oil palm companies did in the Choco region of Ecuador--one of the most...