Bottled up

On International Biodiversity Day, participants at a conference on the issue were served one litre bottles of packaged water, a fairly standard practice. But as one NGO member of the Madhya Pradesh State Biodiversity Board pointed out, the organisers should have avoided the use of plastic. "We should not serve bottled water, at least on International Biodiversity Day," he said. Before he could finish his speech, however, the organisers distributed another lot of bottled water to participants, this time of 200 ml. Clearly, the importance of biodiversity is not a message too many people get.