Field Museum researcher Mike Dillon collecting a new and very un- 

 usual bromelid {Tillandsia sp.) with a botanical "lasso " This plant is 

 known from a single canyon in the Atacama Desert of northern 

 Chile, where its rocky purchases protect it from hungry goats. 



Courtesy M. O. Dillon 



28 



and regeneration of some rainforests. We need to iden- 

 tify the players and we must do it quickly, before they 

 are forever lost. 



Because systematics is the mother of all other 

 biological sciences, furnishing the basic framework for 

 their observations, systematists will be at the vanguard 

 of this expanding tropical data base. We sorely need 

 inventories of many more tropical sites, to document 

 patterns of species richness, to identify "hot spots" of 

 diversity, and to delineate regions of endemism. We 

 must also characterize previously unknown species, de- 

 termine their derivations, and uncover their ecologies. 

 While lacking the romance of rainforest exploration, 

 there is no other way to document natural diversity in a 

 manner useful to science. We need to revisit areas that 

 have been sampled previously to determine the stabil- 

 ity of ecological relationships and the effects of en- 

 vironmental perturbations between sampling periods. 

 We need to train new researchers, especially biologists 

 in the Third World who are in the frontlines of the 

 battle to save the globe's diversity. 



In this piece, 1 have tried to explore the integral 

 relationship between the study of life's diversity and its 

 conservation. The two fields are associated both scien- 

 tifically and philosophically. The idea that evolution- 

 ary biology has left an indelible mark on conservation 

 isn't new. Darwin's conclusion to The Origin of Species, 

 published 130 years ago, bears this out: 



It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, 

 clothed ivith many plants of many kinds, with birds singing 

 on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with 

 worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that 

 these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each 

 other, and dependent on each other in so complex a man- 

 ner, have all been produced by laws acting around 

 us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its sever- 

 al powers, having been origirmlly breathed by the Creator 

 into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet 

 has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, 

 from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful 

 and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. 



Darwin considered this to be the scientific chal- 

 lenge of his evolutionary theory, for humans to recog- 

 nize the fundamental unity of life and to take our own 

 place in nature, with wonder not ignominy. Tropical 

 deforestation is now transforming the grandeur of this 

 view into horror — myriad lineages around us are end- 

 ing forever at the hands of human wantonness and 

 greed. Darwin's placid reflection on life's continuity, 

 with its reference to future evolution, is haunting in 

 today's context. It is a vision that can no longer he 

 ignored. FM 



