At current rates of environmental destruction, especially the wanton destruction of tropical forests in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, we will lose at least a million species within the next ten years and a quarter of all living species within the next fifty years. We the participants of the Morelia Symposium urge the leaders of the world at the Earth Summit to be held in June 1992 in Brazil to commit themselves to ending ecocide and ethnocide, and we propose the creation of an International Court of the Environment modelled on the International Court of Justice at The Hague. We believe there is sufficient knowledge and technology available to reduce the obscene disparity of wealth. We demand a genuine transfer of knowledge and resources from North to South, not the dumping of obsolescent and inefficient technologies and products. There must be an immediate end to the international traffic in toxic waste, urgent reduction of the pollution of rivers and oceans by industrial waste and human sewage, an end to the unprincipled export of banned pesticides and other chemicals to the economically desperate countries of the Third World, and the immediate availability of information and means to allow people to individually and voluntarily pursue the goal of population stabilization.
Traditional societies are the best managers of biodiversity.
For the last five hundred years the knowledge and the rights of the native American peoples have been ignored. We believe that respecting the interests of indigenous peoples, both in the Americas and throughout the rest of the world, who have become exploited minorities in their own countries, is crucial for the preservation of biological and cultural diversity. At the Earth Summit of June 1992, we demand that world leaders sign a Global Climate Change Convention. We insist on rigorous implementation of the Montreal Protocol on Protection of the Ozone Layer. We also demand the signing of a convention to protect biological diversity, and the evidence of concrete progress in negotiations for a global forests treaty.