WASHINGTON, D.C. - Corporations can and should be instrumental in protecting global biodiversity according to a new book entitled, Footprints in the Jungle: Natural Resource Industries, Infrastructures, and Biodiversity Conservation. Footprints is the first book to address the concerns of all parties that have a stake in the development of tropical rain forests, including activists, corporations, local communities, governments, and conservation organizations. Serving as a real-world manual for integrating conservation strategies into business practices, Footprints delivers a compelling series of essays written by leaders in the private sector, academia, and nonprofit organizations. Contributors lay out the environmental and social impacts of logging, mining, oil and gas development, and related infrastructure on the Earth’s critical ecosystems. This broad spectrum of case studies also demonstrates that companies can realize a host of benefits when biodiversity conservation and community development become core business values. Benefits range from an enhanced company reputation to cost savings from more efficient operations.
“We offer this book as a resource to those concerned with finding new approaches appropriate to their own challenges,” co-editors Glenn T. Prickett and Ian Bowles remark in the book. “Together we can develop new rules of the game to make the footprints of resource development bearable – and perhaps beneficial – for the world’s biodiversity and all those who benefit from it.’’
Footprints examines a vast array of biologically rich geographic areas including Peru, Indonesia, Ecuador, and French Guiana. Contributors from a wide range of organizations including Conservation International, Mobil Corporation, the Smithsonian Institution, World Resources Institute, ARCO, Aracruz Celulose, and the Warwick Business School weigh in with their unique perspectives.
Prickett is a senior vice president at Conservation International (CI) and executive director of the Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. Bowles, currently a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, is a former CI vice president. Prickett guides strategic partnerships between CI and major international corporations in a wide range of fields, including energy and mining, agriculture and fisheries, travel and leisure, climate change, water and forestry. Bowles oversaw CI’s work in the areas of policy research, natural resource economics, finance and law.
Footprints illustrates the strategic thinking behind the creation of The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business which was recently formed in partnership between CI and the Ford Motor Company. The Center provides a forum for the environmental community and private sector to work together in creating solutions to critical global environmental problems in which industry plays a defining role. You can learn more about The Center at www.celb.org.
Footprints in the Jungle was published by Oxford University Press and is available online at www.amazon.com.
About the organizations:
The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business engages the private sector worldwide in creating solutions to critical global environmental problems. Created in partnership between Conservation International and Ford Motor Company, The Center promotes business practices that reduce industry’s ecological footprint, contribute to conservation, and create business value for the companies that adopt them. To find out more about The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business, go to www.celb.org.
Conservation International (CI) is an environmental organization working in more than 30 countries around the globe to protect biodiversity and to demonstrate that human societies can live harmoniously with nature. CI develops scientific, policy and economic solutions to protect threatened natural ecosystems that are rich in biodiversity. Read more about CI at www.conservation.org.