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Biodiversity and the extinction crisis, by Chris Howes
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Take a rich mixture of life, a gentle squeeze of evolution, add a pinch of history and flavour liberally with science. The Spice of Life an extraordinary study of life: how it began, what affects its species – and where it is heading. This fascinating and informative book, illustrated throughout with stunning colour photography and diagrams, shows where science is taking us and how we initiate new forms of life. Here are the influences of our world, the terrors of pollution and the need for conservation.
The sheer variety of life on earth is both astonishing and bewildering. Even as we approach the year 2000, we still have little idea of how many other species share our planet, of what they are or how they live. Around 1.5 million species of animal and plan have been recorded already, but current estimates suggest the earth may be supporting 20 to 50 times this number. We hardly know what we are destroying, from the forest floor to coastal wetlands.
We are in the opening stages of a massive, global extinction crisis, with around 100 species annihilated each day by our activities. By the start of the next millennium, between 15 and 20 per cent of the world's species will be lost, their genes gone forever. The speed of this mass extinction far outstrips that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. While we cannot predict the effect this may have on sustaining our living planet, the concepts behind the latest buzzword – biodiversity – are crucial to this understanding.
The Spice of Life is a clear, authoritative and beautiful book that describes how quickly the world is undergoing change, and how urgent our need to initiate controls. It is, above all, a story of our wonder with nature, but it is also a story of our potential fate, unless we can recognise the risks in time.
It is truly time for Western cultures to pay the price for what they covet and value. And, if they covet and value biodiversity for whatever reason – ethical, moral or plain avarice – it is essential that Western cultures wake up to the devastating genetic losses occurring day by day in the rainforests and elsewhere. When the species and their genes are lost, with them go the solutions to our questions.
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