ABSTRACT
As I travel, indeed as I get older, I become increasingly aware of two things about Han: firstly an essential similarity in all peoples, and secondly essential diversity. Bloodworth (1975) puts this nicely: 'Asians are not like or unlike Europeans. They are both. They are possessed of the human conscience, the sex urge, five senses or so, and 46 chromosomes per cell-nucleus. They are hard-wearing, edible, combustible, and they float when inflated. But their programmers - history, environment, belief, tradition, prejudice - have not been the same'. And since 1973 I have been increasingly wondering whether any contribution I can make to the conservation debate in other countries will not be so steeped in my own cultural
background as to be virtually useless. Is what I say as a conservationist understood by those of other cultures? The very concepts of "conservation" and indeed of "natural resources" are essentially a product of the Western cultural tradition and by no means universally understood (Spoehr in Thomas 1956). And if we are understood, will our concern be misinterpreted? Poor and rural people exploit a single environment and their concern for resources is purely local, whereas technological man must pool the resources of many environments and thus his concern must be world wide. But there are those who believe this Western concern for other people's environments to be merely "neocolonialist", an attempt to maintain disparity between peoples.
