Recent research suggests that some 50% of the world’s flora and fauna could be on the path to extinction within 100 years. Everything will be affected – fish, birds, insects, plants and mammals. 1,100 of the world’s nearly 10,000 species of birds - eleven percent – are on the edge of extinction and it is doubtful that majority of these will live beyond the end of the 21st century.

The picture is not pretty for plants either. One in every eight plants is at risk of becoming extinct. Its not just species belonging to remote islands like Andaman and Nicobar or in rainforests or just big birds such as vultures or charismatic animals like the tiger that are at risk. It is everything and it is everywhere - it’s a worldwide epidemic of extinctions. Among the hardest hit so far are beetles, amphibians, birds, and large mammals.

Sydney is home to four million Australians – and a few stuffed Tasmanian tigers. Driven off mainland Austraila millenia ago, the marsupial was declared a protected species in Tasmania in 1936, the same year it became extinct.
Out of the blue, an explosion of amphibian deformities has shocked the world. The cause, yet unknown, could be pollution, parasites or ultraviolet radiation – or climate change. The effect could be far reaching. If it affects frogs, it is likely to affect other forms of life including humans.

Throughout the islands of the Indian Ocean and South-Pacific, extinctions are being caused by species introduced by European explorers a few hundred years ago. Because species on islands are often endemics – meaning they are found nowhere else in the world – their populations are typically small and consequently more prone to extinction.

When a foreign plant is introduced it can become a weed that kills all others. Examples are the Chinese guava tree that blankets much of Mauritius or Lantana introduced in India as a garden plant on account of its attractive flowers, which has gone wild and has displaced natural undergrowth in much of the forests and rural countryside.

Such rates of extinction have occurred only five times in the history since complex life emerged on this planet, and each time it was caused by a catastrophic natural disaster. For instance, geologists have found evidence that a meteorite crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, leading to a demise of the dinosaurs. That was the most recent major extinction. Today the earth is again in extinction’s grip – but the cause has changed. The sixth extinction is not happening because of some external force. It is happening because of us – Homo sapiens, an “exterminator species” as one scientist has characterised humankind (or shall we say ‘human unkind’?)

The collective actions of humans – developing and paving the landscape, clear-cutting forests, polluting rivers and streams, altering the atmosphere’s protective ozone-layer and populating every nook and corner of the earth – has begun to show its impact on lives of creature across the earth. Extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park - we can’t bring them back. Every time we lose a species we lose an option for the future. We lose a potential cure for AIDS or a virus resistant crop. So, we must somehow stop losing species, not just for the sake of the planet, but even from our own selfish viewpoint.

It will be worth our while to reflect on these words of Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who brought down the cosmic time and space inquiry to the commons through his film serial titled “Cosmos” – “What do 70 million years mean to a creature who lives one-millionth as long? We are butterflies who flutter for a day, and think it is forever”