Education is also vital. Conserving biodiversity must be based both on preserving traditional knowledge and on modern understanding. These require basic schooling and capacity-building. These children, when they grow up, will be ill-equipped to make crucial choices about resource consumption and reproduction. We must encourage schools and universities in every country to include awareness-building in their curricula and to promote programmes to help make humanity the guardian, rather than the predator, of biodiversity.
All people derive comfort and delight from the diversity of nature and the miracles of life.
For millennia, its aesthetic value has been expressed through art, poetry, song, literature, music and dance. The privilege of admiring the miracle of life should be a perpetual right for future generations. It is our solemn duty to ensure that they, like us, can benefit from its bounty and enjoy its richness. Our generation's opportunity and challenge is to transform our newfound awareness of the long-term dangers associated with the continued destruction of biodiversity into positive actions that allow us to both protect and to use our global life assets. If we fail, this third millennium may be the last Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan is Patron of IUCN , The World Conservation Union , and RSCN , Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature in Jordan , a Member of the WWF International Board of Trustees and Honorary President of Birdlife International .