ABSTRACT
As human populations have grown over the millennia we have become increasingly aware of our environment and our capacity to threaten the very future of humanity. Without a collective and unified effort on the part of all nations we have the real capacity to destroy a significant part of our environment and to threaten civilisation itself. In the past, through ignorance and over exploitation, we have seen the extinction of many species, notably the dodo and the American carrier pigeon in the nineteenth century and very nearly the North American bison. The list is endless. Stone age man cleared forests and drove the wolf, the bear and many other species
to extinction in parts of Europe. In the past, early hunters could not have been expected to know the consequences of their actions. It was perhaps less forgivable for early settlers to massacre the carrier pigeon in millions to be transported by the trainload to be eaten as a delicacy on the tables of the rich. Like the bison, the pigeons congregated in such large numbers that hunters assumed there was an endless supply. In reality these are communal animals that lived in only a few very large flocks and herds and were very vulnerable to large-scale slaughter. Only the bison survived. The fact that extinctions occur is not really important. Many species that existed in the past, like the dinosaur, have died out from natural causes. Many species will die out from natural causes in the future. There is no way that we can accurately record all the species that ever existed or even the number of species that exist today. In general, however, biological diversity has increased slowly over geological time with occasional setbacks through mass global extinctions.
