绿色消费的反思[外文翻译].docVIP

标题：RETHINKING GREEN CONSUMERISM 原文： Over the past decade, one popular tropical conservation effort has been to encourage consumers to pay more for products that are cultivated or harvested in ecologically sensitive ways. Myriad international development projects have promoted these so-called sustainable practices in forests and farms around the world. Ordinary citizens in the U.S. and Europe participate by choosing to buy timber, coffee and other agricultural goods that are certified as having met such special standards during production. One of the best known of these certified, or green, products is shade-grown coffee beans, which are cultivated in the shady forest understory rather than in sunny fields where all the trees have been cut down.。 Efforts to develop green products deserve support and praise. But in the context of the global economy, sustainable agriculture and consumer actions alone will not be enough to conserve the plants and animals that are most threatened by deforestation. We believe that a bold new approach, which we call conservation concessions, provides a potentially powerful way to expand the green market from its present dependence on products to the broader notion of green services-the opportunity to purchase biodiversity preservation directly.The feasibility of this strategy relies on economics. Huge tracts of public forest in the developing world are being leased for less than $1 per hectare a year. At those prices, conservation organizations, which have long demonstrated a willingness to pay for the preservation of biodiversity, can afford to outbid competitors for land leases and to compensate local people to manage the intact ecosystems. These agreements are legally and economically no different from logging contracts or any other business deal that grants control over natural resources to a particular group. Indeed, the income that developing countries can generate in this way is equivalent to, and often more stable than, what they