Biodiversity - Global Vision, Local Action
Sarukhan: Thank you very much Frank. Thanks to the organizers of this BioForum for the invitation to be here with you. It gives me pleasure for two reasons. Obviously one has to do with the subject of this meeting and the other is I really think this is an extremely nice idea, the program of the BioForum for high school teachers. I can tell you that because my institution, the National University of Mexico, incorporates high school education within the university. A large component of the university's responsibility is high school education. We have 105,000 students in the high school system at the National University. We are responsible for the running of many other private schools or high schools with a population of 160,000 extra students. The University has a great deal of interaction with this level of education. We have to be concerned with the updating of about 8,000 high school teachers directly. It's a hard but worthwhile effort for the university.
So, I know how important this is for offering high school teachers the opportunity to open up their views to update their information and their knowledge in different areas. I'm very thankful to the Academy for this ongoing effort. I am, as you can already notice, slightly handicapped. Not only for speaking after three excellent lecturers, but because my English gets more broken than usual when I have to address large audiences. So you will have to bear with me. I'm putting together pieces of my broken English as much as I possibly can.
So, for that reason, I am going to read part of the presentation. I hope that I will make it clear that way. It's going to have two parts, as the title of the talk suggests. One has to do with a global vision of biodiversity and the problems that we are facing. Then in the second part, we will explain the kind of efforts that we are doing to try to understand, to manage and to preserve the very rich biodiversity of my country of Mexico that has so many limitations culturally, and educationally, and economically speaking. But it is trying to advance its capacity to understand and deal with these kind of extremely important problems. I think in my opinion, and the opinion of many other people, probably what is going to be the most important environmental program for the next years to come is the loss of biodiversity on the planet.
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