WILD goes to Brazil

Wilderness Committee Educational Report Vol.10 - No.05, Spring 1991

From left to right, WILD Team members, Ganga, Sue and Adriane working on this newspaper's production Photo credit: J.P. LeFRANK

WILD Mission Statement

The WILD Campaign is Western Canada Wilderness Committee's international effort to work to protect all of earth's remaining natural ecosystems. WILD's activities include:

1. undertaking research about wilderness;
2. educating people about the necessity of wilderness conservation and sustainable human activity;
3. collecting and synthesizing existing information about the world's remaining natural ecosystems;
4. identifying and mapping the earth's wild areas through:

  • mapping the world's remaining natural ecosystems at a national scale, using consistent base maps and techniques.
  • providing detailed maps and information on each major and significant natural ecosystem, in the form of a Red Book of Endangered Ecosystems.
  • identifying and mapping the most severely threatened and eco-logically significant natural ecosystems as "hotspots" needing the immediate attention of conservationists;

    5. conducting campaigns to protect endangered natural ecosystems;
    6. collaborating with other conservation groups and indigenous and local peoples to achieve our mutual goals by:

  • collecting and popularizing information about wilderness-based sustainable communities and sustainable livelihoods;
  • empowering indigenous and local peoples to live sustainably, particularly through sharing our information with them and sharing information about them with others; and

    7. producing for publication, production and global distribution, information and maps about the world's endangered natural ecosystems and case studies of sustainable communities and livelihoods.

    • The Urgency of the WILD Campaign

    Planet Earth is currently experiencing the most rapid environmental change it has ever seen. Over 50 percent of tropical rainforests, the greatest reservoirs of biodiversity on the planet, have already been burned or logged. One hundred acres or tropical rainforest are being destroyed every minute. The current rate of extinction--estimated to be one species very half hour-- is reckoned to be in the order of 10,000 times greater than the natural, pre-human background rate. Scientists conservatively estimate a loss of 15 to 20 percent of all species on Earth by the year 2000.

    The loss of biological diversity will be catastrophic. Species do not exist in isolation; they are linked in an ecological web. Eradication of one may mean gradual extinction of a host of other species which partially depend on it. Since the biosphere regulates natural processes such as Earth's hydrological cycle, soils and climatic patterns, protection of natural ecosystems is vital to the entire health and sustainability of the planet.

    Earth's wild places are the biodiversity banks of the planet; places where adaptation, specialization and evolution of life forms have been unimpeded. The longer the evolutionary process, the richer the diversity of life. This explains the biological significance of ancient rainforests, particularly Earth's unglaciated tropical rainforests, the oldest of all terrestrial ecosystems. Tropical rainforests are our primary source of new foods and medicines, yet western scientists have investigated less than one percent of tropical rainforest species.

    In many cases, native peoples have the greatest knowledge of earth's wild places. We believe that the loss of wilderness and biological diversity, which have reached crisis proportions, are particularly acute for aboriginal peoples whose existence and culture are most directly linked to wild places.

    WILD (Wilderness is the Last Dream) is a campaign based on the conviction that no human activities are sustainable if we eradicate wilderness. Wilderness is the wellspring of life. We must act now to do something concrete to change the current tide of destruction into a tide of preservation.