“I'm not a biologist, nor an expert on global strategies to safeguard threatened species and vanishing habitats. But I am deeply concerned about the future of our planet,” Harrison Ford tells us in the Foreword of this book.

This concern is shared by many of us who fight for the permanence of life on Earth and are united in a search for solutions. Yet usually we comprise a concert of voices that does not manage to be heard due to the tremendous complexity of the world in which we live. Thus, we need a single voice, such as that of Harrison Ford, so that we may be heard.

Among the different priorities set on an international level, the conservation movement is like the “new kid in the neighborhood,” whose popularity is growing, but who is far from gaining the attention he needs. This movement has to compete for resources allocated to needs deemed to be the most pressing for humankind: food, health, education, religion.

Nevertheless, nature has always been closely linked to traditional human preoccupations. Nature, or rediscovering it, now defines many religions in the world, and has constituted a major theme for our artistic and cultural expressions. Lastly, no one can question the fact that meeting our basic needs in terms of health and food depends on whether or not our natural environment remains sound.

This book provides us with a clear strategy for conserving biodiversity, and indicates a line of action to be followed, but society as a whole is who utilizes natural resources and who can promote and achieve a change in the way these are consumed. And society is also the one to determine the need for maintaining the diversity of life on this planet and the extraordinary variety of opportunities it affords. If we want biodiversity conservation to be adopted as one of the most important social priorities, we must organize and carry out an intense campaign to “sell it” as an attractive, extremely essential product.

The hotspots concept was presented in another title of the collection we have been producing for CEMEX. In the proposal we are making today, that concept has been strengthened thanks to an updating of information on the former hotspots and data on new areas that have been defined as such, which altogether more than justify the publication of this volume. However, there is another reason which, in my opinion, is also very important: the rules of the market.

As a conservation movement, we have forgotten that we live in a consumers' society and that any product we wish to introduce onto the market should be handled according to certain rules. Moreover, we must continually redesign the product we are selling – in this case, the new priority ecoregions of the world – to keep our public interested and thus gain greater penetration and have a better market position.

For this reason, one of the problems we confronted in producing this book has turned into an obstacle keeping us from really being effective in communicational terms. The scientific bases defining this conservation strategy are novel, compelling, and foresighted, but that is not enough to make them reach decisionmakers. Every decision calls for the support of a majority of society, sometimes running against the economic interests of minority groups that could be affected.

The need to transform the natural world into a product that society demands leads us to another matter. Biodiversity includes all plant and animal species, not necessarily only those that are known or even charismatic. Nature as people are familiar with it, that which seems most appealing to us, is but a minimal fraction of biological diversity. Countless books and magazines have filled our eyes with images of beautiful flagship species – some of which have even become icons for conservation campaigns–, while the great majority of species, among them endemic ones, are virtually unknown.

When producing this book, we found ourselves faced with the huge problem of a lack of images for many species and regions that have not been photographed by professionals because they are not appealing enough for most publications. In that sense, we are inspired by the work of Cristina Mittermeier, one of the compilers of this book, in getting together a group of photographers that will open up new perspectives for communicating the most pressing priorities for nature conservation.

For their part, scientific institutions should incorporate the concept of marketing in their structure; in fact, communication departments of conservation organizations will have to become true “advertising agencies.” That is the only way our product, the natural world, will benefit from an attractive, novel form of promotion that may successfully compete in the aggressive world of sales.

They say that money makes the world go round. Today we have the opportunity to define our future and, by taking strategic advantage of marketing and advertising, we may decide what course we wish our planet to take in the future.

Patricio Robles Gil
President
Augrupación Sierra Madre
and Unidos para la Conservación

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