Happy Earth Day

• Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone.  
• The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. 
• About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. 
• An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. 
• Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. 
• Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. 
• The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. 
• Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. 
• Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us.

James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World, Yale University Press, 2009.

Speth is Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University