Word: corales
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...from rivers; another shows the degree to which productive parts of the sea floor have been destroyed by trawling; another highlights how much humanity has altered coastlines. Many of the statistics are staggering: half the world's wetlands have been lost in the past century; 58% of coral reefs are imperiled by human activity; 80% of grasslands are suffering from soil degradation; 20% of drylands are in danger of becoming deserts; and groundwater is being depleted almost everywhere...
...serious about saving our environment? When will environmentalism move from being a philosophy promoted by a passionate minority to a way of life that governs mainstream behavior and policy? How can we understand that Earth is one big natural system and that torching tropical rain forests and destroying coral reefs will eventually threaten the well-being of towns and cities everywhere...
Earth's biodiversity (short for biological diversity) is organized into three levels. At the top are the ecosystems, such as rain forests, coral reefs and lakes. Next down are the species that compose the ecosystems: swallowtail butterflies, moray eels, people. At the bottom are the variety of genes making up the heredity of each species. How much biodiversity is there? Biologists have described a total of between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species. Yet this impressive achievement is only a small beginning. Estimates of the true number of living species range, according to the method employed, from 3.6 million...
...rain forests are losing an area about half the size of Florida each year. Damage to intact forests, which occurs when they are broken up into isolated patches or partly logged, or when fires are set, threatens biodiversity still more. With other rich environments under similar assault, including coral reefs (two-thirds degraded) and salt marshes and mangrove swamps (half eliminated or radically altered), the extinction rate of species and races is everywhere rising...
Researchers of biodiversity agree that we are in the midst of the seventh mass extinction. Even if the current rate of habitat destruction were to continue in forests and coral reefs alone, half the species of plants and animals would be gone by the end of the 21st century. Our descendants would inherit a biologically impoverished and homogenized world. Not only would there be many fewer life forms, but also faunas and floras would look much the same over large parts of the world, with disaster species such as fire ants and house mice widely spread. Humanity would then have...