The living world is disappearing before our eyes. Last week, conservation specialists warned us that two-thirds of tortoise and turtle species could be extinct within 20 years. Before that came headlines about the failure of Canada’s Grand Banks cod stocks to bounce back, the near demise of England’s large garden bumblebee, and a paper in Nature last month warning that apes are being pushed to extinction by commercial hunting and the impact of Ebola on gorilla groups living in remote forests.
We are presented almost weekly with evidence that a growing human population, profligate use of natural resources and habitat…
