ABSTRACT
While economists tout record-breaking increases in global commerce in recent decades, more sobering statistics are being put forth by the world's leading biologists: the loss of living species in recent decades, they report, represents the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ag0.l
Globalization is a powerful driving force behind today's unprecedented biological implosion. Trade in timber, minerals, and other natural commodities is climbing, and many of the world's hotspots of biological diversity are now threatened by a surge of international investment in resource extraction. (See Figure 2-1.) Yet the new rules of the global economy pay little heed to the importance of reversing the biological impoverishment of the planet. This mismatch between ecological imperatives and prevailing economic practice will need to be bridged if the world is to avoid an unraveling of critical environmental services in the early part of this new century.2
