Life on Earth is in danger

The wonderful web of life

Animals began to appear on the planet in a big way about 530 million years ago,

all
      crawling,
        burrowing
          or
           swimming
             creatures

that lived in the sea. A little after this, plants began to grow on the land instead of just in the sea and were quickly

            followed by
              animals
                which wanted to
                   eat them.
                      Then came the dinosaurs...

some dinosaurs were very big and some were very mean…and I’m sure

            you
                    know
                       all
                          about those!

Later came penguins, polar bears,
                                       at the very last minute
                                           (just 200,000 years ago),
                                               people.

And right from the start, humans began damaging other life and the planet by

                                                    using fire carelessly.
                                                        and
                                                           over-hunting

Modern people are just beginning to understand a little about the web of life and the vital importance of biodiversity. They are beginning to realise that they have damaged it badly and, most importantly, that they depend upon it too. People are animals too, like penguins and porcupines.

OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer lets you travel right into the Tree of Life. See if you can find humans! This is an incredible tool for finding out about every single mammal species on Earth, and it shows how each one is related to all the others. Go on, try it!

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The Cambrian ‘explosion’ of life around began about 542 million years ago. All sorts of weird and wonderful creatures appeared in the seas at this time, witnessed by beautiful fossils scientists have found in rocks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and, more recently, from other parts of the world like China. The weird-looking creature on the right is called Anomalocaris and is just one of many utterly bizzare life-forms which scientists have found in these rocks. They were the ancestors of all animals, including you and me. Before the Cambrian time period, life had not changed much over billions of years and very nearly died out altogether when the whole planet froze solid about 700 million years ago.

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Fossil spores from the very first land plants have now been found in Cambrian rocks (about 510 million years ago). As yet, nobody knows what the plants looked like. But they were there much earlier than anyone thought. There’s lots of evidence for land plants by the Ordovician Period, around 470 million years ago.

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Did you know plants grew in the sea? Can you think of any? Yes, that’s right: seaweed. There are lots of different types and they are all algae. Some seaweeds, called kelp, are enormous. Japanese people eat a lot of seaweed — a good idea since it’s full of vitamins and minerals. It even tastes good — I know, I’ve tried it! And did you know that there are even plants which flower in the sea? They are called sea grass (Posidonia — see image on right) and grow in the Mediterranean Sea.

Algae

You can see algae for yourself by collecting a clear glass jar of rainwater (no lid) and standing it in strong sunlight for a few days. The sides of the jar will gradually get coated in a thin green layer. These are millions of algae, the very tiniest and simplest of plants. And how do they get there? Well I’m not answering that. Think about it. Ask. Find out.

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Some people think they are the only animals who feel happiness, sadness, embarrassment and love, or who can think or have imagination and so on. They even deny that animals can feel pain. They use this to justify all kinds of cruelty to us animals with whom they share the planet. Yet scientists who study non-human animals (monkeys, geese, whales and many others) have found that much less separates us from humans than you might think. The main differences between us are:

• you have a complicated language
• you are very clever
• you are also very greedy and want much more than your fair share of things
• you have developed technology. And that, as we all know, is where the trouble started…

The rest of us animals are not human but you humans are certainly animals! But unlike other animals, you have — in a very short time — done terrible damage to the planet and its life systems. So I’d really rather be a penguin than a human.

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Big Bangs and Mega Deaths

Have you heard about mass extinctions? Probably not… People are gobbling up more than their fair share – which means other creatures die.
…but because of people doing so much damage to the planet and to the web of life, lots of animals and plants are dying out completely. That’s what extinction is. And once a creature is extinct, that’s it. There are no second chances. It’s gone for ever.

But there’s nothing new about mass extinctions. Ninety nine percent of all the different types of life — called species — which have ever lived are now extinct. What is completely new is that this is the first extinction caused by people and their wasteful and polluting ways. All the other extinctions in Earth’s long history seem to have been caused by violent natural events. A fireball from space was likely to have been the main reason for extinction of the dinosaurs
The best known of these was the final extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Less well-known but much worse was a mysterious mega-extinction that happened about 252 million years ago. This was so bad that it destroyed around 96 percent (96 out of every hundred) of all lifeforms on the planet.

Understanding mass extinction shows that the global life system is delicate. If it’s messed up, it could mean the complete collapse of the life-support systems we all depend upon.

Humans could easily go extinct. The important lesson to learn from mass extinctions is that they hit complex life hardest. It’s things like bacteria and rats and cockroaches that survive — not people or (sob!) penguins. You have been warned!

Try my Big Bangs and Mega Deaths quiz

• Click or tap here for quiz 2

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What happened to the dinosaurs?

This extinction seems to have been caused by two quite different things. One was a great series of volcano eruptions in what is now the Deccan area of India. These volcanoes belched vast quantities of gases into the air, poisoning the atmosphere all around the planet and causing many animals to die including, especially, the dinosaurs. The reason seems to have been that all the poisons in the air killed off many of the plants so that the dinosaurs simply died of starvation.

catastrophe!The other thing was a giant asteroid or comet which slammed into the Earth and blew up, throwing huge amounts of water vapour and dust high into the air. This messed up the world’s climate and destroyed the protective ozone layer which shields life from harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.

But you know what? Some ‘dinosaurs’ survived: the birds. Before the 66-million-year extinction event (scientists call this the K-T event), a group of dinosaurs called maniraptorans — over tens of millions of years of evolution — became both smaller and feathery. Some of this group evolved to become birds and so survived the K-T event, probably because their small size and ability to fly meant they could adapt more easily to changing conditions. Today, these warm-blooded, flying ‘dinosaurs’ are everwhere in the air — and penguins like me, which ‘fly’ under the sea can even dive to depths over 500 metres!

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Mysterious mega-extinction

This extinction seems to have been caused by a massive series of volcanic eruptions in Siberia, Russia. Enough lava erupted to cover the whole planet in a 20-foot layer. The volcanoes also spewed out billions of tons of poisonous gases. As if that wasn’t enough, a huge new crater has recently been discovered in Australia, the second largest direct hit from an asteroid or comet in the last billion years. This could have occurred around 250 million years ago and may have been the trigger for the devastation suffered by life on Earth at that time.

It’s likely that the volcano eruptions and possible asteroid hits triggered rapid global warming (like today, but for different reasons) which may in turn have set off something much more scary.

fizzzz – pop!This warming may have unfrozen strange stuff called gas hydrate which normally sits on the bottom of oceans. If this stuff is uncorked by warming, it fizzes and melts and blasts off lots of gas called methane. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas when it gets into the air, making matters even worse for life.

And today, there are billions of tons of this methane gas hydrate lying on the bottom of the oceans… and the oceans are warming up! If you want to find out more about greenhouse gases and global warming, take a look at my Hot Earth Guide.

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Apocalypse soon: the beginning of the end?

Are people really threatening life on the planet? What’s the evidence?

One good way to find out what’s going on is to look at ‘indicators’ — you know, rather like traffic lights.
Traffic signals are indicators where red means danger – stop! Green means clear, go-ahead; amber means caution, watch out; and red means stop! I’d say these traffic light indicators are on red.
Let’s look at some examples of indicators.

And
   people
     are
        cutting
           and
              burning

these forests more and more both for their timber and to make new ranch land for raising yet more animals for rich people to eat (poor people can’t afford meat), palm oil plantations and crops like soybeans . The boreal forests are going fast too, mostly for making paper for newspapers, magazines and offices.

“… most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day — or some 50,000 species a year — as the forests fall.”
Source: Scientific American

Remember, it’s not just the trees that are lost but all the animals whose home the forest was like monkeys, tigers or parrots.

According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s natural forests already have been destroyed

– Source: National Geographic

Palm oil
The World Wildlife Fund says an area the equivalent size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour to make way for palm oil production. Say no to palm oil.

What are soybeans used for?
Most (about 75 percent) are used as animal feed to increase meat production. You could say the ever increasing demand by humans for meat is costing the Earth when you think about it. Not only rainforests are destroyed but the millions of farm animals also produce massive amounts of greenhouse gases and create serious water pollution affecting both rivers and the sea.

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Monkey. By: Zhao !

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Tiger. By: Angelo Antonelli

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Drying up? Lakes, rivers and wetlands

These are home to many species like birds, amphibians (such as frogs , toads, and newts) and fish. Yet in the last few decades, these creatures have declined greatly in numbers and in health.

Particularly worrying are frogs and other amphibians. Nobody knows for sure why these little animals are dying so fast but it seems likely that chemical pollution (particularly certain types of pesticides) and global warming are at least partly responsible.

The primary causes of amphibian extinctions are pollution, loss of habitat, climate change, invasive species, road mortality, over-harvesting for the pet and food trades, and the infectious disease chytridiomycosis, which is spread by human activity.

– Source: Save The Frogs

And there’s the usual problem with humans wanting more land for farming and cities, so wetlands get drained and rivers get ‘tamed’ to try and stop them flooding. Then some people have powerboats and go fishing for fun and others like shooting wetland birds for fun.

Sad case of river dolphin

This dolphin, the ‘baiji’, used to be found only in China’s longest river, the Yangtze. There were about 400 in the late 1980s but by 2006, it had become extinct.
Source: National Geographic

The very existence of frogs worldwide is being threatened by a killer fungus.

A toad; very useful in the garden. Photo: Kristie

The fiery Luristan Newt.

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Frogs in (for example) North America often grow up all deformed — without legs, or with extra ones. Since 1995, tens of thousands of deformed frogs have been found. There are probably several reasons for this. One cause appears to be certain pesticides. Even small amounts of nitrate fertilisers — used by farmers and gardeners — can cause frogs to show symptoms of poisoning too. The amounts needed to make the frogs sick are much less than the amounts farmers put on their fields. The same is true with a fungicide (a chemical which kills fungus which attacks plants) called triphenyl tin. This fungicide causes deformity and death in various types of frog. It is highly poisonous to a range of water-living creatures, from dragonfly larvae and snails to fish. Meanwhile, in Costa Rica, the disappearance of some frogs from the cloud forest looks to be because of global warming, another thing people are causing.

Sadly, despite hundreds of exinctions already, and even though by 2010 there were 486 amphibian species listed as “Critically Endangered“, people don’ t seem to care.

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Many insects are pests. They eat many of the food plants farmers grow and, not surprisingly, farmers try many tricks to stop the insects. Pesticides are the latest human invention for killing pest insects (the ‘-icide’ bit of ‘pesticide’ means ‘killer’). Pesticides are poisonous chemicals which farmers spray on their crops. The poison kills the insects. “Death to all insects.” End of problem. Well not quite. The pesticides don’t just disappear. They stick around and poison many other creatures. Untold numbers of innocent animals (including humans) die too, but no-one bothers about them. Pesticides also pollute water supplies and plants that have been sprayed with them often contain small amounts when people eat them. People who support genetic engineering (GE) claim that if farmers use GE plants which make their own pesticides, then farmers will need to spray less pesticide which will be better for everyone.

Things to think about

• the world’s biggest pesticide firms are also the biggest seed-producers and biggest GE companies (The world’s top 10 pesticide firms, GMWATCH)
• some pesticides resist breakdown for many years and can leapfrog around the globe in the wind. These are the notorious POPs, persistent organic pollutants, and include dioxins, PCBs, DDT, toxaphene and chlordane

In Britain, a detailed study found some carrots on sale in shops with not twice, not four times, but 25 times the allowed pesticide residue (what’s left after harvest) in them. These organophosphate (OP) insecticides are highly dangerous nerve poisons. No one knows the long term effects of consuming low levels of OPs or any other substance, nor how they react with preservatives, colourings and stuff in the food you eat [1].
More than 1 in 10 people who are regularly exposed to OP pesticides (like farmers) will suffer irreversible physical and mental damage [2].
Many popular pesticides seem to damage the body’s ability to fight infection. They could be a hidden killer in poor countries where infections are a leading cause of death [2].

• Find out about all pesticide types at Extoxnet.
• Visit the PDP website for serious in-depth information about residues in food (database information in PDF format)

1. Henry Doubleday Research Association News, Summer 1995, 1-2; 2. New Scientist, 21/2/98, 5; 3. Science News, 13/4/96, 149

• Each year, around 2.5 million tons (2,500,000 tons = 5 billion pounds) of pesticide are dumped on the planet’s crops. [2]
• In 2002, an estimated 69,000 children were poisoned by pesticides in the US [3]
• The World Health Organization reports 220,000 people die every year worldwide because of pesticide poisoning. Hard to believe, isn’t it? [2]
• In 2001, the world pesticide market was valued at $32 billion ($32,000,000,000). Big bucks! [1]
• Although most pesticides (80%) are used in the rich countries, most of the poisonings are in poor countries. This is because safety standards are poor, there may be no protective clothing or washing facilities, insufficient enforcement, poor labeling of pesticides which are used by farm workers who can’t read anyway. Few people know much about pesticide hazards. [2]
• Pesticide residues in food are often higher in poor countries. [2]
• Farmers who use pesticides have a ‘significantly higher rate of cancer incidence’ than non-farmers. [2]
• In the US, nearly one in ten of about 3 billion kilograms (that’s 6,613,800,000 pounds) of toxic chemicals released per year is known to be capable of causing cancer (in other animals as well as people). [2]

1. US EPA Pesticide Market Estimates; 2. Public health risks associated with pesticides and natural toxins in foods, David Pimentel et al., College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA; 3. US EPA fact sheet.

There are over 100 types of OP pesticide in use. You can find out more about them in this Pesticide Action Network factsheet.

Poor people, poisonings and pesticides

The FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) suggest (September 2004) at least 5 million poisonings and ‘a few thousand fatalities’ each year. Nobody really knows how many people die. What is known is that 99% of the poisonings take place in poor countries where people don’t know how to use pesticides properly and anyway do not have access to protective equipment.

or can’t understand the language on the label – if there is one.

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The seas and oceans

As you know, the sea is home to many animals including fish (yum! Sorry but I have a thing about fish) and mammals like seals and whales and dolphins. And, most importantly so far as I’m concerned, it’s home to many types of seabirds including penguins like me! And — you guessed it! — many of my seabird friends are in trouble. Our numbers have dwindled by over a third in under 30 years. Every single one of the albatrosses, those huge majestic birds of the wild stormy oceans, is in some kind of trouble and three species are critically endangered. And yes, several types of penguin are threatened and three are including the little Galapagos penguin.

Part of the reason wildlife in the seas is having problems is that people are taking much more than their fair share. And it’s not as though people even eat all the fish they catch. Lots of the fish are just ground up to make fertilisers or food (fish meal) for other animals (like fish-farmed salmon) which people then eat.

Fish are in trouble too. The world’s fishing grounds, once home to a wonderful mix of different creatures, are dying as powerful ships with big trawling nets and sonar systems to spot fish shoals suck up millions of tons of fish, including young ones which aren’t even old enough to breed and make more fish. Perú once had the world’s biggest fishing industry. That collapsed because of over-fishing. Likewise, the Grand Banks — a vast area of shallow water east of Newfoundland in Canada — used to be bursting with fish like cod. That fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, destroyed by people’s greed.

Now another sea is almost fished to extinction: the North Sea (north west Europe). Here, big cuts in the number of fish people can catch have been ordered by governments to try and stop the collapse.

One of my relations in South Georgia, coming back from fishing. Thanks to Peter Barham for this picture.

Now, people — never learning lessons and always wanting to make more money — have started fishing in the Antarctic Ocean and are even sweeping up the krill which all seabirds like me, whales and seals depend on as well as the fish themselves. And some countries are still killing whales.

Coral reefs – Have you ever seen a coral reef? These are home to an awesome variety of plants and animals rather like the tropical rainforests on land. They are very beautiful too. But they too are in big trouble and many are dying because of what is called bleaching.

Now: how about having a go at my Indicators Quiz to check out how you made it through that scary part of my guide.

You can check out whether an animal is in danger in the IUCN Red List.

Antarctic Ocean with huge iceberg.

Krill (Euphausia superba) are little shrimpy things. They, along with other crustaceans such as copepods, are at the bottom of the food chain in the Antarctic Ocean. Without them, there would be no fish, seals, whales or seabirds. Humans are now beginning to disrupt this food chain by catching millions of these tiny creatures.

Shame on them!

Japan, Iceland and Norway between them kill hundreds of whales every year.

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What is bleaching

Sea sick

Corals are really communities of tiny animals called polyps. They make bony frameworks, like tiny houses, in which they live. These frameworks build up to make huge coral reefs, home to loads of colourful organisms. The biggest of these is the Australian Great Barrier Reef. Corals also soak up some of the carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the atmosphere from cars and industry, rather like undersea trees.

Coral polyps cannot survive without tiny plants called algae. The algae live inside the polyp and provide it with food which they can make by photosynthesis from the sun. In turn, the polyp provides a safe haven for its algal friends… until humans’ pollution starts to mess things up. This comes into the sea from polluted rivers and makes the algae leave the coral polyps so that the animals turn white and die. This is bleaching and it’s caused by several things:

• abnormally warm waters (global warming), especially during the El Niño event in 2015-2016
• polyps get choked with silt from dredging or from big rivers after heavy rains have swept soil from ploughed or deforested land
• pollutants like fertiliser run-off and pesticides from farming
• human sewage (which acts as a fertiliser)
• Poisonous algae may also grow rapidly creating algal blooms (‘red tides’) and killing lots of fish.

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• Click or tap here for my Indicators Quiz

• cutting down forests
• covering good land in concrete, buildings and new roads
• polluting the land, air and water (seas, rivers and lakes) because of cars, airplanes, ships, farming chemicals and fertilisers, garbage (especially plastic), sewerage, fish farming
• vacuuming the oceans of fish so that in many parts there are hardly any left
• trying to kid yourselves that there’s no problem

People are even covering the seas in garbage and other pollution like oil spills

All these things cause other animals and plants to die off and become extinct… and they are doing in a big way. They either starve to death or are poisoned. But the biggest cause of this man-made extinction is loss of habitat — the destruction of places in which creatures used to live.

RARE: A celebration of wonderful life from Joel Sartore on Vimeo.

Five ways people are wrecking the planet

1. Climate Change and ozone-destruction caused by pollution from humans’ machines could completely upset global weather patterns and cause catastrophe. No-one yet knows what will happen but we do know it is already starting
2. Over-hunting for food, for fur or, nowadays, fun. Thousands of creatures have been wiped out by people. Some of the most famous are the dodo, the passenger pigeon and the great auk.
3. Introducing alien species. Sometimes people do this by accident but often it’s deliberate. Australia is one of the most notorious examples of the damage done by alien species. European migrants brought with them many animals and plants and some of these have become serious problems. Cats, foxes and rats have driven many once common creatures almost to extinction by hunting them. Rabbits are a serious pest too because they breed so fast, eat almost anything green and are almost impossible to control. And then there’s the great cane toad disaster…
4. Destroying the natural world by cutting and burning rainforests, covering the ground with more houses, office blocks, factories and roads or using life-destroying farming methods
   spraying poisons on crops
5. Genes could be in trouble too. If you’ve read my guide about genetic engineering, you’ll know that they are the building blocks of life. And yes, they’re in trouble because of what people are doing to them. This is partly because of genetic engineering and partly because the gene pool is getting smaller.
   Genetic engineering could make matters even worse because the world could come to depend on even fewer varieties of food crops. And many of these could be controlled by the big corporations who will own the seeds…
   Or genetic engineering could make matters much better because fortunately, a great deal of research into improving food crops using genetic engineering is open-source.
   The common sense solution is to learn from nature and be sure to preserve that wonderful mix of genes which gives us all that even more wonderful variety of life.

Click or tap here for my Wrecking the Planet quiz

By “wrecking the planet”, I mean people are damaging that part of the planet in which all we living things exist: the biosphere

What is climate change?

I have made a guide about climate change — also called global warming. Click here to see it now.

What is pollution?

I have made a guide about pollution. Click here to see it now.

Dodo, a flightless pigeon. It was discovered by humans in 1598 on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. 60 years later it was extinct, killed and eaten by humans and its habitat destroyed. Image: The British Library

Passenger pigeon, These beautiful birds once existed in vast flocks North America but these. Were rapidly hunted to extinction by humans and the last one was shot in 1900. Image: “Birds of eastern Canada” (1919)

Great auk. Because it was flightless and easily caught, the great auk was hunted to extinction by humans, the last recorded pair being killed in Iceland in 1844. Image: The British Library

What is the gene pool?

Everything that is alive contains thousands of genes. The gene pool is a sort of imaginary pool in which every single gene from every single living thing can be found. If some living thing becomes extinct, then some of the genes which were only found in that formerly living thing are lost forever. So the gene pool becomes a little smaller. Humans are causing many extinctions and so there are many potentially useful genes being lost all the time from the gene pool.

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About Ozone

Ozone gas is a type of oxygen. It filters the powerful radiation from the sun — the heat you feel and light which makes the days. Without this shield of ozone, most life couldn’t exist on the surface of the planet. So humans are messing up something which affects almost all plants and animals.

oh dear! It was in my home, the Antarctic, where people first realised what was happening to the ozone. An enormous hole appears every spring, bigger each year. No one worried too much because few people (never mind us poor penguins!) live in that part of the world. Then the hole got so big it began to affect southern countries like Australia and New Zealand. People there now have to wear clothes and big hats on sunny days to stop the sun burning their skins and causing skin cancers. And now there’s another big hole which opens up above northern Europe and North America every spring too. By 1996, the ozone had dropped to half what it should have been in the spring.

CFCs come in many different sorts. Not only do they destroy the protective ozone, they are also very strong greenhouse gases and so add to global warming. Most countries have now stopped making them. The most recent studies show that the ozone is slowly recovering following the international agreement to stop producing ozone damaging products (the Montréal Protocol of 1987)

About oxygen

The oxygen we all need to breathe is made up of 2 oxygen atoms stuck together. Ozone is unusual because it is made of 3 oxygen atoms which makes it unstable and tries to react with other things. This makes it poisonous to the living things that breathe oxygen. But without the ozone in the stratosphere, we’d all be fried! Why? Because this gas acts as a filter to the most harmful of the sun’s radiation: ultraviolet, often just called UV.

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Humans are mega-killers

The first human settlers in New Zealand found that hunting the huge flightless birds called moas was really easy. Unfortunately, they had killed them all in less than a hundred years. This recent finding supports the idea that early human hunters were to blame for the extinction of large animals in places like Australia and the Americas, according to American anthropologist Jared Diamond [1].

1. New Scientist, 1/4/00, 15

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What does it matter to humans? Does anybody care? Answer

If an asteroid hits the planet and causes big trouble for life, nobody is to blame. Asteroids aren’t alive and they don’t think. But people do think and that looks like turning out to be more dangerous for other life than any asteroid. It is ‘thinking people‘ — supposedly intelligent and wise — that are bringing about this latest mass extinction.

Anyone with a little vision can see the indicator traffic lights are on red. But hardly anybody seems to be looking.

There are none so blind as to those who will not see

– Proverb traced back to John Heywood, 1546

If lots of people drive cars and don’t stop at the traffic lights, you know what happens: there’s a huge crash and people get hurt or killed. Well that’s what is starting to happen to much of life on our planet. So why don’t people care? Why are they trashing the planet with their big feet?

And
   what
      do
         you
            think?

Now I have a special question for you: what is the most dangerous animal that has EVER existed? Can you guess? (Hint: no, it’s not T. rex or the great white shark!)

See my answer here

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Humans

Think about it

Why bother? Why is biodiversity vital for humans?

Perhaps you think it doesn’t matter if humans are causing a lot of living things to go extinct. Well, I bet you didn’t know about something called ecosystem services. These vital services — which people use for free without even thinking about them — depend on a healthy biodiversity.

What are people doing about it?

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) came into being at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was an attempt by most of the world’s nations to protect biodiversity. It has not been very successful so far because destruction of habitats and species extinctions continue faster than ever.

So it’s up to you young people to get moving and DO SOMETHING to help!!!

But what can I do, you ask?

Go to the next section to find out

YES!!!

For a start YOU care or you wouldn’t be reading this. And if people didn’t care, there wouldn’t be any organisations like WWF, RAN, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and many others. Nor would there be national parks and other protected areas.

Homo sapiens is the name for human beings given by scientists. It means “wise man “. Huh! Hubris or what?

Chart of extinction events that wiped out most life on Earth.
Source: LiveScience

But you are… which is really great because now you understand the problems better than most adults. And soon you will be an adult and then you can really do something to help life in danger!

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Big footprints on our planet

If every human on the planet (there are more than 7 billion of you) wanted to live like most North Americans, there simply wouldn’t be enough resources. If every human on Earth lived like the average Canadian (for example), you’d need at least three planet Earths to provide all your materials and energy. This is the idea of ‘ecological footprints’. A ‘footprint’ is the amount of land each person needs to take from Nature to support their consumption of materials — like food, energy, wood and so on. [1]

Canada is one of the world’s richest countries with the highest ‘standard of living’ = highest level of gobbling resources. The ecological footprint of an average Canadian adds up to an area about the size of three city blocks (4.8 hectares of land — nearly 12 acres). Unfortunately, the actual productive land available to each person on the planet today is, on average, about one city block (1.6 hectares, less than 4 acres)… one third of the area which each Canadian is now using.[1] So there’s what’s called an ‘ecological deficit’ — like drawing more money out of a bank than you have so you’re really ‘borrowing’ from someone else.

[1] International Institute for Sustainable Development

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The WWF and the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Living Planet Report for 2020 is out. Horrifying stuff! Global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% on average between 1970 and 2016.

Living Planet Report 2022.

What you kids can do to help!

Young humans like you will, as you grow up, increasingly hold the future of life on our planet in your hands. It is you who inherit the Earth. Adults — including your parents and family — are doing the damage today because many of them simply don’t realise what they are doing to the planet. But you do! So what you choose to do as you get older can make a big difference.

Here’s what you can do to start the ball rolling:

At home and at school

Good luck! The future of all of us depends on what you kids of today do to make sure tomorrow comes for people, penguins and polar bears…

What do you think about life in danger? Have you any good ideas about what we can do to make things better? If you do, please write to me. As long as your message is sensible and friendly, I promise to reply. Use the toolbar at the bottom of the page to contact me.

If you’ve found my Life in Danger guide useful, please would you be kind enough to make a donation to help run my website. I know you kids don’t have credit cards or anything but perhaps you could persuade either your parents or your school to make a donation. It’s so easy and you can do it here.

Click here to go to my Life in Danger links page to find out about groups concerned at what people are doing to all other Life on Earth.

In 2015, about 40 per cent of total U.S. (for example) energy consumption was used for heating buildings. And energy usually means pollution (unless your household only uses renewable energy – probably unlikely if you have no insulation). Pollution matters for all kinds of reasons; in particular, climate change. If you want to know more about pollution, energy and climate change, I have guides. Just click “Tiki’s menu”

Polluting aircraft Image: dsleeter_2000

Commuting is polluting

Millions of people spend hours every day, five days a week, driving to work and back. This is called commuting and it is immensely wasteful of energy and causes terrible pollution and, of course, traffic jams. There has to be a better way…

This is called biodiversity and is the whole purpose of this guide. All living things are part of different ecosystems and biomes – including humans who haven’t yet understood how ecosystems provide vital services upon which they depend. By the way, there are eight major biomes on our planet: tundra, taiga, four types of forest (temperate deciduous, temperate evergreen, tropical deciduous and — best known of all — tropical rainforest), grassland and desert.

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Compost is food for plants that looks a bit like soil. You can make it almost anywhere out of vegetable peelings and waste food. In my picture, I’ve just finished building a traditional compost heap held together by recycled timber. Every time I add more stuff, I cover the heap over with an old carpet. This helps it rot quickly. If it’s big enough, your heap will get very hot inside. Can you think why?
Did you know…

• you can even make compost indoors using a ‘wormery’ The worms eat all the decaying food and vegetable peelings and stuff and leave rich crumbly compost.
• compost heaps are a great place to look for different types of creepy-crawlies. They are full of life – mostly bacteria and fungus – but also many types of worms (no legs), spiders (8 legs), insects (6 legs) and centipedes (hundreds of legs). They’re all part of the composting process and birds like to eat many of them. Take a jar, a pair of tweezers and a magnifier and see how many living creatures you can find. Don’t forget to let them out again: the compost is their home!
• if you put stuff which you can compost in the garbage, it stinks. And it’s wasted too. It all ends up in landfill mixed with all the other mountains of stuff people throw away.

So you see composting is a great way to recycle and you can use the results to grow more plants.

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Many insects are pests. They eat many of the food plants farmers grow and, not surprisingly, farmers try many tricks to stop the insects. Pesticides are the latest human invention for killing pest insects (the ‘-icide’ bit of ‘pesticide’ means ‘killer’). Pesticides are poisonous chemicals which farmers spray on their crops. The poison kills the insects.death to all insects End of problem. Well not quite. The pesticides don’t just disappear. They stick around and poison many other creatures (including humans – over 200,000 people are thought to die every year because of pesticide poisonings). Untold numbers of innocent animals die too, but no-one bothers about them. Pesticides also pollute water supplies and plants that have been sprayed with them often contain small amounts when people eat them. People who support genetic engineering (GE) claim that if farmers use GE plants which make their own pesticides, then farmers will need to spray less pesticide which will be better for everyone.

Things to think about

• the world’s biggest pesticide firms are also the biggest seed-producers and biggest GE companies (The world’s top 10 pesticide firms, GMWATCH)
• some pesticides resist breakdown for many years and can leapfrog around the globe in the wind. These are the notorious POPs, persistent organic pollutants, and include dioxins, PCBs, DDT, toxaphene and chlordane

In Britain, a detailed study found some carrots on sale in shops with not twice, not four times, but 25 times the allowed pesticide residue (what’s left after harvest) in them. These organophosphate (OP) insecticides are highly dangerous nerve poisons. No one knows the long term effects of consuming low levels of OPs or any other substance, nor how they react with preservatives, colourings and stuff in the food you eat [1].
More than 1 in 10 people who are regularly exposed to OP pesticides (like farmers) will suffer irreversible physical and mental damage [2].
Many popular pesticides seem to damage the body’s ability to fight infection. They could be a hidden killer in poor countries where infections are a leading cause of death [2].

• Find out about all pesticide types at Extoxnet.
• Visit the PDP website for serious in-depth information about residues in food (database information in PDF format)

1. Henry Doubleday Research Association News, Summer 1995, 1-2; 2. New Scientist, 21/2/98, 5; 3. Science News, 13/4/96, 149

• Each year, around 2.5 million tons (2,500,000 tons = 5 billion pounds) of pesticide are dumped on the planet’s crops. [2]
• In 2002, an estimated 69,000 children were poisoned by pesticides in the US [3]
• The World Health Organization reports 220,000 people die every year worldwide because of pesticide poisoning. Hard to believe, isn’t it? [2]
• In 2001, the world pesticide market was valued at $32 billion ($32,000,000,000). Big bucks! [1]
• Although most pesticides (80%) are used in the rich countries, most of the poisonings are in poor countries. This is because safety standards are poor, there may be no protective clothing or washing facilities, insufficient enforcement, poor labeling of pesticides which are used by farm workers who can’t read anyway. Few people know much about pesticide hazards. [2]
• Pesticide residues in food are often higher in poor countries. [2]
• Farmers who use pesticides have a ‘significantly higher rate of cancer incidence’ than non-farmers. [2]
• In the US, nearly one in ten of about 3 billion kilograms (that’s 6,613,800,000 pounds) of toxic chemicals released per year is known to be capable of causing cancer (in other animals as well as people). [2]

1. US EPA Pesticide Market Estimates; 2. Public health risks associated with pesticides and natural toxins in foods, David Pimentel et al., College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA; 3. US EPA fact sheet.

There are over 100 types of OP pesticide in use. You can find out more about them in this Pesticide Action Network factsheet.

Poor people, poisonings and pesticides

The FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) suggest (September 2004) at least 5 million poisonings and ‘a few thousand fatalities’ each year. Nobody really knows how many people die. What is known is that 99% of the poisonings take place in poor countries where people don’t know how to use pesticides properly and anyway do not have access to protective equipment.

or can’t understand the language on the label – if there is one.

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I have a right to live on our planet without being poisoned or starved…

… and so have we …

…and so have we.

We kangaroos are hopping mad at what people are doing to our planet.

You people may not like lizards but we too have a right to be here.

And many of us seabirds are in real trouble because of over-fishing and poisoning with oil spills and other pollution.

Lots of my turtle friends are killed by getting caught in fishing nets and, because we breathe air like you do (and whales and dolphins), we drown.

I guess you already know people have killed so many of us whales that there aren’t many of us left.

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My links to other sites

The WWF and the Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Living Planet Report 2020, shows that global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% on average between 1970 and 2016. Shocking!!
Roots and Shoots Join the wonderful Jane Goodall and becme the change
Global Footprint Network: Find out about Earth Overshoot Day and calculate your own ecological footprint.

Kiwi Conservation Club: New Zealand-based forest and bird conservation project for kids. Did you know kiwis could kick, have their noses at the end of their beaks and can live for 40 years? No? Neither did I. Great site for kids.

National Geographic – for kids

the Rainforest Foundation: Supports traditional peoples of the world’s rainforests in their efforts to protect their environment.

Survival International: Supports tribal people by helping to protect their lands and rights to it.

There are loads of places to visit so I’ve just selected a few which I like the best. And please avoid disappointment and don’t send me more links, no matter how useful you think they are. Lots of people do but I simply don’t have time to deal with them. Sorry!