To: Mr Noel Brown, Director, United Nation Environment Programme
From: Edward Goldsmith

Dear Mr Brown,
[...] The World Rainforest Movement, based in Penang, Malaysia, in conjunction with Ecoropa, based in Paris, France, have drawn up a petition asking for an extraordinary meeting of the United Nations to consider the critical and urgent problem of global deforestation, and to work out an effective plan to bring this intolerable trend to a halt. Over three million signatures have been gathered in support of this petition, which we would like to present to Mr Perez de Cuellar himself on the 19th September of this year in New York. [...]
Our plan is for the petition to be presented by forest people from Sarawak, Brazil, the Himalayas and the Canadian West Coast, together with religious leaders. Our petition is a strictly non-political one. Our only aim is to prevent this continued destruction of the world's rain forests, whose implications are far reaching and indeed which could well give rise to global climatic changes, which when compounded with those brought by the emission of greenhouse gases from industrial and agricultural sources could make much of our planet uninhabitable in a matter of decades. [..]