In Lake Baikal in southeastern Siberia during an evolution of some 25 million years, a unique, rich, and highly diverse, biocoenosis has developed, in which some three-quarters of the ca 2,400 plant and animal species are endemic. Conditions for its survival include stability of the chemical composition and water temperature of, particularly, the deeper parts of the Lake. Recently the large-scale development of wood-processing industries has had, as described in the present paper, an increasingly destructive influence on this biocoenosis. This destruction seems irreversible as the deeper parts of the Lake, which goes down to 1,620 metres, cannot be renewed.

Knowledge of the present status and future potential of the world's marine food resources is a key prerequisite to their ecological exploitation. Rationales for the exploitation of these resources are twofold. Most important is the expectation that more time to reduce human population growth—the ultimate goal—could be made available. Secondly, because fish and shellfish are typically high in their content of protein and low in fat, nutritional quality in the human diet can be improved through their increased use.

Fundamental to marine biological production are the phytoplankton populations which comprise the basis of the oceanic food-structure. This production involves the photosynthesis of organic matter by phytoplankton and the subsequent flow of this matter through the food-web. Spatial and temporal discontinuities in marine production are related to the patchy distributional pattern of phytoplankton and to natural fluctuations in oceanic populations due to geographically and temporally varying conditions. A review of past estimates of the potential marine yield suggests that there has been significant variation in the methodology employed to arrive at these estimates.

Much-improved management of the oceanic food resources is urgently needed. Present mismanagement of these resources includes chemical pollution and the overexploitation of several important fish-stocks, which together threaten the viability of marine life. On the positive side, the future potential of the overall marine food-resources appears to be considerably larger than the present yield. The current harvest can be augmented by further development of aquaculture and by the exploitation of unconventional species, both of which could offer a relatively untapped source of valuable protein. Thus, Man must quickly establish and implement a rational, global management plan for the world's oceans and control his own population numbers to ensure conservation of the marine food-resources.

Monitoring and evaluation of air quality in urban and industrial areas are essential for air quality management. For evaluating the composite air-quality in the concomitant presence of several pollutants in the atmosphere, many air quality indices have been developed. This paper presents two indices, the ‘composite air-quality index (I1)’ and ‘the standard-exceeding index of air pollution (I2)’ together with their respective sub-indices, for the pollutants monitored and for use in combination.

The first index, I1, is based on the annual average concentration measured in a year for each pollutant; it measures the overall composite air-quality. By relating the annual average concentration (Ci) of each pollutant to its hygienic standard (Si), as many (Ci/Si) values as the number of pollutant parameters monitored are found, whereupon I1 is computed as the geometric mean of the maximum and average of all (Ci/Si) values. A greater value of I1 means worse composite air-quality. It is simpler to compute than those more sophisticated ones in the literature, and holds the unique characteristic of considering, and yet not overemphasizing as formula (3) does (Nemerow, 1974), the maximum (Ci/Si) value.

Rapid development for the exploration and extraction of mineral and petroleum resources in the cold-dominated arctic tundra and subarctic taiga regions of the world has resulted in a series of unexpected potential impacts on the environment, wildlife, and human health and safety.

Surface transportation, especially over low wet-tundra areas in summer, causes long-term changes in vegetation through reduction of insulation to the underlying permafrost. The number of passes over the same track, ground pressure of the vehicle, and speed of travel, affect the degree of degradation. For permanent roads, gravel removed from adjacent stream-beds or hillsides and laid directly on the tundra mat, has provided the most suitable road-bed. These roads, and the removal of gravel, however cause aesthetic and practical problems such as spreading of dust, impoundment of water, behavioural barricading of animals, alteration of river channels, and siltation of streams.

Anadromous fishes constitute a major food resource; alteration of stream channels or siltation of rivers can affect their movement and reproductive success. Oil-spills in aquatic systems, especially in rivers, are harder to control and clean up than terrestrial ones. Recovery of ponds in which oil has been spilled takes several years. The oil-rich outer-continental shelves in the Beaufort, Chukchi, and Bering Seas, now under exploration for oil, are especially sensitive, as they are highly productive and contain unique populations of marine mammals and birds.

Human habitation of the Arctic requires transport of food, fuel, and construction materials for lodging, and disposal of refuse and human wastes which, due to the permafrost-underlain vegetative mat, is difficult in arctic areas. Heating by fossil fuels results in ice-fogs in winter and accumulation of atmospheric pollutants at ground-level during thermal inversions at all seasons.

Perhaps the greatest impact on arctic ecosystems is simply the increased intervention of the human population. Where native people were previously only sparsely settled or nomadic in the tundra, and on coasts where they tended to congregate, now the economic need for resources has resulted in increased pressure overall which will result in decreasing habitats for wildlife, destruction of wilderness areas, and increased access to humans for further exploration and recreation.

Criteria in selecting a symbol for The World Campaign for The Biosphere are analyzed around fourteen questions posed to the World Council For The Biosphere (WCB) and the International Society For Environmental Education (ISEE). To be truly supranational the symbol must be free from words and focused on mind and The Biosphere—the key end-points in the circular causal chain of ‘education for ecologically sustainable development’. As the target audience is external to WCB-ISEE, the symbol should be open to use by other organizations, and perhaps have a designated place for their identification. To the extent that the symbol poses a moral question it should be spiritual, emotive, and applicable to instances of overexploitation and excessive waste. Technology should not be automatically excluded, nor should the focus be restricted to organizations (versus people) or specific age-groups.

The essential message to be communicated is wholeness through feedback. Suitable geometric forms include irregular lines ending where they begin, circles, spheres, and (in terms of computer imagery) pulsating objects. Existing symbols with appropriate traditions to build on include: the yin-yang symbol of the Tao; the Atlas symbol of person-planet; individual life-forms such as a tree; and the glory—the shadow of a human head surrounded by concentric, rainbow-coloured circles.

Fisheries stocks are rapidly declining around the world. A reduction in the consumption of unsustainable seafood may help curb this decline. Sustainable seafood consumption is not commonplace, even in the marine science and conservation community. The frequency of unsustainable and/or unlabelled seafood at marine science and conservation meetings motivates this enquiry and call for leadership. Information about the species served and where they were caught/farmed was obtained for seven marine ecology and conservation meetings held in Australia, attended by c. 4000 people from around the world. Menu item sustainability was assessed according to the relevant sustainable seafood guide, which considered stock status and impact of fishing/aquaculture method. Seafood was served at all meetings; four meetings served at least one unsustainable species, and only two meetings served a sustainable species. Additional leadership by marine scientists, especially conservationists, is urgently required to turn science into action and ensure that sustainable seafood is available, not only at meetings, but more widely, to achieve a positive conservation outcome.

Despite efforts spanning more than a decade, plastics continue to be the least recycled component of the USA's municipal waste stream. This study addresses a significant gap in knowledge about the operation of the plastics recycling market by investigating and analysing the characteristics and experiences of manufacturers and vendors of consumer products with recycled plastics content.

The study collected information through a survey of this segment of the USA's plastics recycling industry. The analysis of this information confirmed that the industry, as a whole, is young. Nevertheless, it offers a very wide variety of products. These face stiff competition from virgin resin plastic products, or from other virgin competing materials such as wood and cotton. Recycled plastic products are often more expensive than their competitors. Some manufacturers and vendors, especially the younger ones, addressed this problem by finding a niche market with consumers who are willing to pay a premium for environmentally friendly products. On the other hand, companies whose products are successfully competing against virgin products are more likely to have operated longer, to be vertically integrated (producing raw materials and consumer products), and to be more diversified in the number of resins they handle.

Manufacturers and vendors of recycled plastic products in the USA have gained considerable experience since the early years of plastics recycling. Nonetheless, they continue to face some serious challenges. Operators of materials recovery facilities that process PCR have an important role to play in supporting the industry by improving the quality of their product (i.e. PCR). However, the most important factor for securing continued growth of the industry is the expansion of markets for the industry's products. The responses to the survey indicate that, while there are actions that manufacturers and vendors can take to increase their chances of success, the effect of government policy remains overwhelming. Policymakers can facilitate growth in plastics recycling by stepping up their efforts to implement effective demand-side policies and by adopting policies to internalize the environmental and social externalities of plastics manufacturing and use.

Tropical forests can provide forest dwellers with a sizable proportion of their dietary needs. Yet, many development and conservation organizations tend to disregard these opportunities, promoting market-oriented reforms that aim at introducing cash crops and markets for non- timber forest products (NTFPs) in the name of poverty alleviation and/or biodiversity conservation. In so doing, they help relegate wild food plants to the position of food for the poor (De Beer & McDermott 1996; Neumann & Hirsch 2000), reserve food in case of famine (Takasaki et al. 2004), or food supplementing that produced on farm plots (Ousseynou & Tieguhong 2004). This comment discusses the economic rationale for the consumption of wild edible plants by forest-dwelling communities, comparing the results obtained from two methods of evaluation. The paper is based on one month of fieldwork during December 2004 carried out by the author together with Theresa Wong and two specially-trained research assistants in Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary (Western Thailand).

Government conservation measures will always depend on public support. While more has been learnt about which species the public values and which conservation measures are socially acceptable, less is known about the criteria that the public thinks government should consider when making conservation investment decisions. This study uses a stated preference best–worst scaling method to gauge the views of a sample of the Australian public on what they think government should consider when allocating funding to threatened species conservation. We found that the three most important factors were the risk that a species might become extinct, the likelihood that a conservation intervention might be effective and the risk of unintended consequences for other species that could potentially arise if the measure was implemented. Costs of conservation measures and the degree to which the society accepts these costs were considered much less important. The latter aspect was consistent with the high level of trust that respondents placed in the judgement of experts and scientists concerning threatened species conservation. We conclude that the Australian Government has a societal mandate to spend more money on threatened species conservation, provided that there is little risk and that it is backed up by science.

Programmes focused on buffer zones (BZs) and park revenue-sharing (PRS) are aimed at sharing protected area (PA) benefits with local communities to meet their development needs and, in turn, improve the PA–people relationship. However, whether and how these programmes improve public attitudes towards PAs is little understood. We assessed how residents perceive the benefit and burdens of Nepal’s BZ programme, which shares up to 50% of PA revenue with communities, and how this process relates to their perceptions of change in the PA–people relationship since the BZ programme was implemented. Survey results from 2122 households in the BZs of six PAs showed that residents’ perceptions of PA–people relationships had improved since the BZ programme’s implementation. Furthermore, the perceived trend in the PA–people relationship was positively related to the perception of benefits and satisfaction with coordination between the PA and local government; it was negatively related to perceived burdens of BZ-related laws in rural development, history of damage/loss from wildlife and misunderstandings of the purpose behind BZ funds being given to local communities. These findings provide valuable insights for PA managers in Nepal and worldwide in designing new or improving existing mechanisms of benefit-sharing with local people and to improve PA–people relationships.

Key to bridging knowing–doing gaps is analysis of the constraints binding interactions between decision-makers and conservation biologists to clarify the problems they address. We apply this analysis to decision situations in the Northern Vosges (France), which illustrate three kinds of constraints: governance, framework and initiative. We explore how conservation biologists can mitigate constraints so as to foster more ambitious conservation actions in each case. The first case explores attempts at reintroducing the lynx (Lynx lynx). In this case, we show that governance plays a key role, in the sense that conservation actions should focus on improving the acceptability of reintroductions to key stakeholders. The second case refers to water monitoring schemes. Here we show that framing is the dominant constraint. This means that conservation actions are tightly limited by the use of a restrictive scientific apparatus. The last case study, fish stock protection, is constrained by initiative. Here, decision-makers have too much leverage to implement solutions they favour, even if they are not the best options in conservation terms. Exploring how our framework relates to the existing literature allows us to highlight its usefulness for rationalizing conservation problem framing and for strengthening the ambitions of conservation actions.