The wettest place on Earth is here. And the tallest sea cliffs. And Hawai'i is home to over 10,000 life forms found nowhere else on the globe. Only once in every 100,000 years did a new species successfully navigate 2,500 miles of salt water and come ashore to establish itself here. Slowly these colonists evolved in to an array of new life forms often very unlike their continental ancestors.
Extinction is a natural process.
But in Hawai'i it began accelerating 1,500 years ago with the arrival of the Polynesians and then accelerated even more in the late 1700's with the arrival of the Europeans. Today, extinction rates are thousands of times greater than the natural rate. If we are to save what it left, today's unnatural rates of extinction cannot continue.