ABSTRACT
World Environment Day, 5 June, was established by the General Assembly to mark the opening of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. The conference proclaimed that both aspects of man’s environment—the natural and the man-made— were essential to his well-being and to the enjoyment of basic human rights, even the right to life itself. Natural areas are important, not only for the knowledge they give us about basic life systems, but also because—with the relentless increase in the world’s population and urbanization—they are essential sanctuaries for mankind’s physical and spiritual sustenance. All nations, whether they be rich or poor, developed or developing, must come to share a common concern for the human environment and be persuaded to take urgent actions to arrest and reverse the wanton destruction we continue to inflict upon it.
