Modern societies are featuring a growing lack of tangible connections to the natural world, and surrealistic perceptions of life and death are flooding the vacuum created. These new perceptions will have profound implications for the future of sustainable use, and the cultures that continue to depend on using wildlife. For example, a recent graduate of a Master's programme in environmental sciences at a prominent Canadian university told me she did not believe it was natural for people to eat meat. What does this statement infer about the relative importance of science, biological training, and learned fields such as anthropology in shaping opinion, com-pared to the power of ideological trends supported by pop mythology? What does it say about the world's remaining hunter – gatherer societies, some of whom eat only meat?

When I was in university several years ago, I was fascinated by a behavioural study of hyenas on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. It seems that on rainy nights during the antelope calving season, hyenas would hunt across the plain, killing one calf after another. Apparently, very young calves are extremely vulnerable on dark, rainy nights and sometimes several hundred were killed. The calves were not eaten. Nothing appeared to restrain or satisfy the hyena's killing instinct.

This seemed like such wasteful, mal-adaptive behaviour. I questioned my professors about how such lack of restraint could evolve in a predator, when it was so obvious that these predators would have to depend upon antelope to support them at other times of the year. I was told that predatory behaviour was inefficient in nature, it was almost always a great challenge for a predator to catch enough prey to survive and feed its offspring. Conservation conveyed no advantage to the individual predator, there was no penalty for killing too many, and for these reasons, a restraining mechanism had simply not evolved.

Many years later, I realized that this answer was not quite correct. One predator had evolved a capacity for self-reflective thought, and the ability to understand the consequences of individual action. That adaptation is called consciousness, and in humans it has evolved to where we are not only conscious, but we are aware that we are conscious. The conservative behaviour that results from this self-reflective capability is known as sustainable use.

We stand at the brink of the 21st century and the dawn of the third millennium, gathered here from all corners of the world to consider the successes, failures and future of sustainable use. It is a timely undertaking. The world is moving quickly, swept in a rising tide of information technology, which will bring many new opportunities, but may also pose immense challenges to sustainable use, and the interests and cultures that depend upon it.

I hope to bring a different perspective to the many excellent papers you will hear on sustainable use during the symposium. I believe that the sustainable use of living resources is a formative concept for the human species, which has helped shape our bodies, minds and social systems over the past 3.5 million years. The conservation principle of sustainable use separates human beings from other predators, and provides us with the rationale to care for other life forms and the small planet we share with them. How we use this foundation and convey its concepts to people will have a critical bearing on the future of sustainable use.

The mounting surge of protectionism worldwide threatens to break the linkages between humans and other life forms that have evolved over the millennia. As this unfolds, humans will lose their practical, psychological and spiritual connections with the natural world. Fundamental disconnection between humankind and nature is already apparent, in a breach that has opened between rural and urban cultures in North America. The trend toward protectionism should be balanced with other views and approaches. Protection based on sentimentalism alone, will redefine the basis for human relationships with the natural world, in ways that risk destroying the foundation for wildlife conservation.

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