"Based on his and his colleagues' calculations, some 50 percent of the world's flora and fauna could be on a path to extinction within a hundred years. And everything is affected: fish, birds, insects, plants, and mammals. By Pimmís count 11 percent of birds, or 1,100 species out of the worldís nearly 10,000, are on the edge of extinction; it's doubtful that the majority of these 1,100 will live much beyond the end of the next century. The picture is not pretty for plants either. A team of respected botanists recently reported that one in eight plants is at risk of becoming extinct. 'It's not just species on islands or in rain forests or just birds or big charismatic mammals,' says Pimm. 'It's everything and it's everywhere. It's here in this national park. It is a worldwide epidemic of extinctions.'"

The Sixth Extinction by Niles Eldredge "There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year – which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis – this "Sixth Extinction" – is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed."

Worldwide Fish Stocks in Danger of Depletion

Daniel Pauly, one of the [Science Magazine] article's authors, said that over the last 50 years the international fishery has moved into deeper waters -- a trend that could foreshadow stock losses similar to what happened to cod in Canada.

"You have one fishery collapsing after the other," he said in an interview from his office at the University of British Columbia. "The parts of the world that were not fished are now fished... This is a very powerful trend."