

In the beginning…
Happy birthday!
Life on Earth is 3,500 million years old today… well, more or less. Living things have certainly been around on our planet for a very long time.

In case you hadn’t noticed, 3,500 million is a very long time indeed. (In fact, life may be as much as 4 billion years old!) Imagine that each of those years was one foot in length. How far would that line of feet run for?

26 times round the world is correct! You can probably cover a couple of feet in every stride but you could never walk that far in all your whole life! Certainly I couldn’t!
Click the answer of your choice.
But now life is in trouble and I’m afraid the reason is you people. I’ll come to that in a moment but first,Professor Tiki prepares to speak
a
quick
history
of
Life
on
Earth…
Early life on Earth was very simple — just tiny blobby things called bacteria.
After a while, slightly different green blobby things called algae began to appear.
These had ‘learned’ one very special thing: how to use the sun to make food. This was to be the most important development ever for future life on the planet. These tiny green blobs were the first simple plants. Algae eventually gave rise to plants with a stem and leaves like this one. And without plants, no animals could exist. If you were to hop into a time machine and go back 3,500 million years, you’d quickly die for two reasons: the air you breathed would be poisonous and there would be no food.
So why isn’t the air we breathe today poisonous?

This wonderful blue planet is home to all life. It’s the only home we have so it needs to be cared for.

In fact, most algae form strings rather than blobs.
Part of the food of all plants and
Cyanobacteria is a gas that is poisonous to us animals called carbon dioxide. They slurp this up, along with water and sunlight, to make sugars by a very clever process called
photosynthesis. And in doing this, they make what to them is a waste gas called oxygen. I’ll bet you know that no animal can live without it. So you see how important these little plants were then and still are today.

This photo shows strings of cyanobacteria. They are very tiny and used to be called blue-green algae when scientists thought they were just another type of plant.

Green leaves using the sun to make sugars to give the plant energy.
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!


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.

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.

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.

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.
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


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!

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.
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.
The most famous forests in the world are those of the Amazon in South America, but there many others. Some are in the tropics (tropical rainforest) but most are in Russia and Canada (
Boreal forest). It is the
tropical rainforests which are particularly rich in different types of plants and creatures.
Peole using chain saws kill millions of trees every year
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 AmericanRemember, 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.
Monkey. By: Zhao !
Tiger. By: Angelo AntonelliDrying 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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

World’s biggest reef badly damaged
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (and many others around the world) was seriously damaged in 2015-16 by the worst bleaching event ever recorded. This was because of a serious El Niño event caused, almost certainly, by global warming
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.

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.

Now do you see what I mean when I say life is in trouble? Stop!
All the indicators are on red; stop! Help! And the trouble (sorry! I always seem to be having to say this) is you people. You’re
- 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
- 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

- 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.

- 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…

- 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 - 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.

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.

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
Surfing wallabies?
How can you be sure to save an animal from extinction? Well you could turn it into a pet, says Michael Archer, director of the Australian Museum in Sydney. So much damage has been done to Australia’s marsupials (marsupials are animals that keep their babies in pouches) by cats and dogs — all brought in by European migrants — that he suggests people keep native animals like cuddly possums or friendly little quolls instead. What’s more, many marsupials are very playful. Wallabies even like surfing in the ocean [1].
Penguins like cold seas and ice best!Uh oh! Don’t even think about keeping penguins as pets please! We like cold sea, icebergs and fresh fish — not your warm houses!
1. New Scientist, 29/4/00, 40-43
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.
Everyone knows about the famous mass extinction event 66 million years ago which killed off the dinosaurs. A large asteroid hit the Earth destroying about three quarters of all life. This was the fifth mass extinction event in the history of life on Earth. But now that humans are doing so much damage, we seem to be entering a sixth 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?
Click or tap here for my Big Feet quiz.
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

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?

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!

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 DevelopmentPeople depend on ecosystem services and hardly anyone knows about them. Perhaps the most important and obvious service is the provision of oxygen by organisms that photosynthesize: plants and cyanobacteria. No oxygen? No animals; no humans and no penguins!
There are many more ecosystem services, all vital to people but mostly ignored or taken for granted. These were first clearly defined in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), back in 2005 which split them into four different types:
- Supporting services which are needed by all the other ecosystem services such as soil formation and recycling of nutrients
- Provisioning services which are things like seafood, wood, food crops, medicines, water and energy (biomass and hydropower)
- Regulating services such as climate regulation and the removal of carbon dioxide from the air, pest and disease control and cleaning up (purification) of air and water.
- Cultural services which is all about all the beautiful things our planet has to offer. People’s lives are enriched by these. One obvious example is when you go on holiday to the seaside or a national park
Where would you be without those? You may live in a city but you still depend on these vital ecosystem services… and that’s why biodiversity matters!
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
Tip 1 — The four Rs

Recycle everything you can
Reduce what you buy
Reuse what you can
If something is broken, see if you can repair it
Tip 2 — Start an eco-club

Grab the interest of your friends, parents and school teachers. How? Maybe you could make a presentation on your computer? Or a slide show? Or a poster? Or leaflets to give out? Get people who know about ecosytems, ecology and biodiversity to come and talk to your club and inspire you all! How do you do that? How about contacting your local university biology department?

Tip 3 — Set an example

Reduce your demands for energy and water in your home
- wear your clothes more than once before you wash them
- take showerstake short showers. Try to avoid baths: They waste water and energy
- turn electrical things off when you’re not using them
- use low energy lights like LEDs
- Get insulated! If you live in a cold region and your house isn’t insulated, the chances are your families’ energy bills will be high. Insulation is the way to go
Tip 4 — Vacations


Try to take your holidays nearer near home so you don’t have to do loads of travelling — particularly on airplanes. They are mega-polluters!
Tip 5 — Buy local


Buy items made or grown locally rather than from far away. This cuts out ‘food miles’.
Tip 6 — Grow some of your own food


If you have a little patch of ground or a garden, why not give it a try? You might be surprised at how easy it can be. And you can’t get more local than your own back yard!
If you have space, try composting waste food, vegetable peelings and stuff. You can even make compost in a small bin which contains special earthworms
Tip 7 — Cut the commute


Could your parents live closer to where they work (or the other way around) and near your school? You could discuss this with them at a family meeting! Then none of you has to travel so much
Tip 8 — Try not to use the car!


Cars = traffic jams + pollution, so use bicycles and buses whenever you can rather than cars. Better still, walk.
Tip 9 — Give wildlife a home


if you have a back yard or garden at home, see if you can make a pond. Bluetit (chickadee) at nesting box. Image: Hans OlofssonAnd how about making a wildlife refuge too? You know, somewhere for birds to nest (make bird boxes) with bushes and small trees — even heaps of sticks and leaves where small animals can hibernate in the winter. A tidy neat garden is not a good place for wildlife — especially if you spray pesticides and use artificial fertilisers.
Tip 10 — know your planet

find out more about our beautiful planet and remember that you have to share it with millions of other life forms (species), all of which have a right to be here
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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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!