The Sixth Extinction

I try to be as upbeat and positive as I can about the environmental situation, even though I'm more than aware of things being terribly wrong.

Sometimes though, the news just becomes so full of awful stories it becomes really difficult to be at all positive. Most professional biologists now believe that Earth is currently losing animal and plant species at a rate that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. We are thus said to be in the midst of the Sixth Extinction.

Here are some links about this, and a few ideas of how we might be able to help in some small way.

A World Without Coral Reefs - are we pushing tropical corals to extinction?

India's Vanishing Vultures - how have three of the commonest birds in India been made endangered?

(I've blogged previously about vultures - most recently here and shared a poem here.
International Vulture Awareness Day is 5 September).

Elephants and rhinos are facing their worst poaching crisis in years, but so are smaller animals - to such an extent that many protected forest reserves are empty of animals.

We can all read widely to educate ourselves about the issues, join campaigns to protest about some of the issues, or donate to wildlife charities.

The wildlife welfare charity Care for the Wild recently launched a good campaign called Right Tourism, which aims to help people to avoid damaging wildlife while they're on holiday. The topics they look at include: attractions that use captive animals; wildlife on the menu and environmentally sustainable wildlife watching holidays.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other webpages where you can find out more.