World Parks Congress Experts Available for Comment 8/29/2003
From: Lee Poston of the World Wildlife Fund, 202-345-5643; e-mail: lee.poston@wwfus.org web: http://www.worldwildlife.org News Advisory: The World Parks Congress, a global gathering of experts on parks and protected areas, Sept. 8-17 in Durban, South Africa, comes at a critical time for the world's wild places and wild species. World Wildlife Fund experts are available for comments and interviews on the issues and expectations for this landmark event, held every 10 years and involving almost 3,000 delegates. William Eichbaum is vice president for Endangered Spaces, overseeing WWF's programs in some of the world's most important ecoregions -- including the Congo, Eastern Himalayas, New Guinea, Galapagos Islands, Everglades and East Africa. He can discuss the importance of the World Parks Congress, what WWF hopes it will achieve, the future of parks and protected areas and the importance of community based conservation. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, he has played a central role in protecting the Chesapeake Bay and has been instrumental in protecting the environment and promoting energy efficiency in Eastern Europe, Russia and China. Eric Dinerstein is WWF's chief scientist and vice president for science. He is a co-architect and co-author of the Global 200 ecoregions, an analysis to identify the most biologically important ecoregions on Earth in the terrestrial, freshwater, and marine realms. Eric has an encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife and habitats, and can discuss how parks and protected areas work around the world, habitat and species loss and importance of parks and protected areas to conservation. His diverse research has ranged from collaborating on a study of animals reliant on old-growth habitat in the Pacific Northwest to establishing a field research program on snow leopards in northern India and conducting a four-year field study of greater one-horned rhinoceros. For his M.S. and Ph.+#egrees in biology from the University of Washington, Eric studied the prey species of tigers in Nepal and the ecology of fruit bats in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica. Other WWF experts from across the globe can talk specifically about climate change, forests, marine, freshwater, pollution, agriculture, trade, community based conservation and the role of indigenous people in parks and protected areas. --- World Wildlife Fund, known worldwide by its panda logo, leads international efforts to protect the diversity of life on earth. Now in its fourth decade, WWF works in more than 100 countries around the globe. This news release and associated material can be found on http://www.worldwildlife.org | |