Last Chance to See (25 page)

It is the sheer rate of acceleration that is as terrifying as anything else. We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

There are currently five billion human beings and our numbers are continually growing. We are fighting for space with the world's wildlife, which has to contend with hunting, pollution, pesticides and, most important of all, the loss of habitat. Rain forests alone contain half the world's species of animals and plants, yet an area the size of
Senegal
is being destroyed every year.

There are so many threatened animals around the world that, at the rate of one every three weeks, it would have taken Douglas and me more than three hundred years to search for them all. And if we had decided to include threatened plants as well, it would have taken another thousand years.

In every remote corner there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving them. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.

But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the
Yangtze river
dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks?

Well, yes it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our own survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients for many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures but the ugly and less dramatic ones which we need most.

Even so, the loss of a few species may seem almost irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving.

There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

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Document creation date: 06.06.2008

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