Individual humans are for the most part insulated from the reality of species loss. Alienated from the natural world, wrapped in a cocoon of material pleasures, guided by anthropocentric attitudes, the average human being is unaware and non-caring about the biological holocaust that is transpiring each and every day. The facts are clear. More plant and animal species will go through extinction within our generation than have been lost thorough natural causes over the past two hundred million years. This is biological meltdown, and what this really means is the end to vertebrate evolution on planet Earth.
Nature is under siege on a global scale.
Biotopes, i.e., environmentally distinct regions, from tropical and temperate rain forests to coral reefs and coastal estuaries, are disintegrating in the wake of human onslaught. The destruction of forests and the proliferation of human activity will remove more than 20 percent of all terrestrial plant species over the next fifty years. Sixty-five million years ago, a natural cataclysmic event resulted in extinction of the dinosaurs. Even with a plant foundation intact, it took more than 100,000 years for faunal biological diversity to reestablish itself. More importantly, the resurrection of biological diversity assumes an intact zone of tropical forests to provide for new speciation after extinction.