GRETCH1

The effort behind this book was initiated after dinner one night, under the Arizona desert sky, at an annual meeting of the Pew Fellows in Conservation and the Environment. A small group gathered informally to lament the near total lack of public appreciation of societal dependence upon natural ecosystems. This ignorance represents but one of a complex of interacting factors responsible for today’s array of anthropogenic disruptions of the biosphere. Yet it clearly represents a major hindrance to the formulation and implementation of policy designed to safeguard earth’s life-support systems. Moreover, lack of understanding of the character and value of natural ecosystems traces ultimately to a failure of the scientific community to generate, synthesize, and effectively convey the necessary information to the public.