Because as you read this very article, thousands of plants and animals are being driven inexorably to extinction. Dr. Edward O. Wilson, a biologist at Harvard University, estimates that 27,000 species per year, or three per hour, are becoming extinct. At this rate, up to 20 percent of earth’s species could be extinct in 30 years. But the rate of extinction is not constant; it is growing. It is expected that by early in the next century, hundreds of species will disappear each day!

“Isn’t extinction part of the natural order of things? The answer is no, at least not on the scale it has occurred in recent times. Over most of the last 300 years the rate of extinction of species was about one per year. At present the human-caused rate of species extinction is at least a thousand times as great as that. . . . The cause of this rapid acceleration in the rate of extinctions is human activity.”—The New York Public Library Desk Reference.