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Tiki's
Lightning Quick Guide:
Life
on our planet - our only home - is in big trouble. Many creatures
are dying out completely and it's almost all because of what people
are doing. So far as the rest of life is concerned, humans are the
worst disaster to hit this planet since a massive fireball 66 million
years ago. Find out more about endangered life and what you can
do about it in this guide
to find out how you can use this guide.
I've
made some special Quizzes which you'll find
in different parts of this guide. Scoring
is automatic. Can you make it 100 per cent each time? For some
questions, there might be more than one answer (square radio buttons)
or only one answer (round radio buttons). Have a go anyway and
see how much you're discovering about Life in Danger.
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Tiki's
Guide to Life in
Danger
In
the beginning...
Happy birthday!
 
Life on Earth is 3,500 million years old today... well, more or less. Living
things have certainly been around on our planet for a very long time.
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In
case you hadn't noticed, 3,500 million is a very long time indeed.
(In fact, life may be as much as 4 billion years old!) Imagine that
each of those years was one foot in length. How far would that line
of feet run for?
Click the
answer of your choice. |
But now life is in trouble, and the reason I'm afraid is you people. I'll
come to that in a moment but first,
a
quick
history
of
Life
on
Earth…
Early life on Earth was very simple -- just tiny blobby things called
.
After a while, slightly different green blobby things called
began to appear.
These had ''
one very special thing: how to use the sun to make food. This was to be
the most important development ever for future life on the planet. These
tiny green blobs were the first simple plants.
And without plants, no animals could exist. If you were to hop into a
time machine and go back 3500 million years, you'd quickly die for two
reasons: the air you breathed would be poisonous and there would be no
food.
So why isn't the air we breathe today poisonous?
Changing the air - Part of the 'food' of
all plants is a gas that is poisonous to us animals called carbon dioxide.
They slurp this up, along with water and sunlight, to make sugars by a
very clever process called photosynthesis. And in doing this, they make
what to them is a waste gas called oxygen. I'll bet you know that no animal
can live without it. So you see how important these little plants were
then and still are today.
| Try my Life on Earth
Quiz to see
how you're doing. |
The wonderful web of life
Animals began to appear on
the planet in a big way about ago,
 all
crawling,
burrowing
or
swimming
creatures
that lived in the sea. A little after this, plants began to
on the land instead of just in the ...
...
and were quickly
followed by
animals
which wanted to
eat them.
Then came the dinosaurs...
 ...and
I'm sure
you
know
all
about
those!
Later came penguins, polar bears
and,
at the very last-minute
(just 100,000 years ago),
people.
And right from the start, humans began damaging other life and the planet
by
using
fire carelessly.
and
over-hunting
Modern people are just beginning to understand a little about the web
of life and the vital importance of .
They are beginning to realise that they have and, most importantly, that they depend upon it too. too, like penguins and porcupines.
| Try my Web of Life
Quiz to see how
you're doing. |
Big
bangs and mega-deaths
Have you heard about mass extinctions? Probably not...  
...but because of people doing so much damage to
the planet and to the web of life, lots of animals and plants are dying
out completely. That's what extinction is. And once a creature is extinct,
that's it. There are no second chances. It's gone for ever.
But there's nothing new about mass extinctions. Ninety nine percent of
all the different types of life - called species - which have ever lived
are now extinct. What is completely new is that this is the first extinction
caused by people and their wasteful and polluting ways. All the other
extinctions in Earth's long history seem to have been caused by violent
natural events.  
The best known of these was the final about 66 million years ago.
Less well-known but much worse was a mysterious
that happened about 250 million years ago. This was so bad that it destroyed
around 96% (96 out of every hundred) of all species of life on the planet.
Understanding mass extinction shows that the global life system is delicate.
If it's messed up, it could mean the complete collapse of the life-support
systems we all depend upon.
The
important lesson to learn from mass extinctions is that they hit complex
life hardest. It's things like bacteria and rats and cockroaches that
survive -- not people or (sob!) penguins. You have been warned!
Try
my Big Bangs and Mega-Deaths Quiz
now!
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Apocalypse soon: the beginning of the
end?
Are people really threatening life on the planet? What's the evidence?
One good way to find out what's going on is to look at 'indicators' --
you know, rather like traffic lights.
Green means clear, go-ahead;
amber means caution, watch out; and red means
stop! I'd say these traffic light indicators
are on red. Let's look at some examples of indicators.
Forests -
The most famous forests in the world are those of the Amazon in South
America, but there many others. Some are in the tropics (tropical rainforest)
but most are in Russia and Canada (boreal forest). It is the tropical
rainforests which are particularly rich in different types of plants and
creatures.
 And
people
are
cutting
and
burning
these forests more and more both for their timber and to make new ranch
land for raising yet more animals for rich people to eat (poor people
can't afford meat). The boreal forests are going fast too, mostly for
making paper for newspapers, magazines and offices.


People have already cut down half the world's forests. The Europeans have
cut down almost three-quarters of theirs. But what's really scary is that
each year an area of forest gets cut or burned down
which is larger than Greece, Florida or Bangladesh.
Remember, it's not just the trees that are lost but all the animals whose
home it was like monkeys, tigers
or parrots.
Lakes, rivers and wetlands -
These
are home to many species like birds, frogs and fish. Yet in the last 30
years, these creatures have . Particularly
worrisome are the frogs and other amphibians. Nobody knows for sure why
these creatures are dying so fast but it seems likely that chemical pollution
(particularly certain types of pesticide) and global warming are at least
partly responsible.
The seas and oceans
- As you know, the sea is home to many animals including fish (yum! Sorry
but I have a thing about fish) and mammals like seals and whales and dolphins.
And, most importantly so far as I'm concerned, it's home to many types
of seabirds including penguins like me! And -- you guessed it! -- many
of my seabird friends are in the trouble.
Our numbers have dwindled by over a third in under 30 years.
Part of the reason wildlife in the seas is having problems is that people
are taking much more than their fair share of fish. And it's not
as though people even eat all the fish they catch. Lots of the fish are
just ground up to make fertilisers or food (fish meal) for other animals
which people then eat.
The world's fishing grounds, once home to a wonderful
mix of different creatures, are dying as powerful ships with big
trawling nets and sonar systems to spot fish shoals suck up millions of
tons of fish, including young ones which aren't even old enough to breed
and make more fish. Peru once had the world's biggest fishing industry.
That collapsed because of over-fishing. The Grand Banks, a vast area of
shallow water east of Newfoundland in Canada, used to be bursting with
fish like cod. That fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, destroyed by
people's greed like the Peruvian industry.
 
Now another sea is almost fished to extinction: the North Sea (north west
Europe). Here, big cuts in the number of fish people can catch have been
ordered by governments to try and stop the collapse.
Now,
people – never learning lessons and always wanting to make more money
- have started fishing in the Antarctic Ocean and are even sweeping up
the krill which all the birds like me, whales and seals depend on as well
as the fish themselves. And some countries are still killing whales.
Coral reefs -
Have you ever seen a coral reef? These are home to myriads of plants and
animals rather like the tropical rainforests on land. They are very beautiful
too. But they too are in big trouble and
many are dying because of what is called .
Try
my Apocalypse Soon Quiz
to check out how you made it through that scary part of my guide.
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What's going on?
Now do you see what I mean when I say life is in trouble? 
All the indicators are on red; stop! Help!
And the trouble (sorry! I always seem to be having to say this) is you
people. You're
- cutting
down forests
- covering
good land in concrete, buildings and new roads
- polluting
the land, air and water (seas, rivers and lakes) because of cars, airplanes,
ships, farming chemicals and fertilisers, garbage (especially plastic),
sewerage, fish farming
- vacuuming
the oceans of fish so that in many parts there are hardly any left
- trying
to kid yourselves that there's no problem

All these things cause other animals and plants to die off and become extinct...
and they are doing in a big way. They either starve to death or are poisoned.
But the biggest cause of this man-made extinction is loss of habitat - the
destruction of places in which creatures used to live.
Five ways
people are wrecking the planet
-
and -destruction
caused by
from humans' machines could completely upset global weather patterns
and cause catastrophe. No-one yet knows what will happen but we do know
it is already starting

-
over-hunting
for food, for fur or, nowadays, fun. Thousands of creatures have been
. Some of the most famous are the dodo, the passenger
pigeon and the great auk
 
-
introducing
alien species. Sometimes people do this by accident but often it's deliberate.
have driven many once common creatures almost
to extinction by hunting them
-
destroying
the natural world by cutting and burning rainforests, covering the ground
with more houses, office blocks, factories and roads or using life-destroying
farming methods

-
are in trouble too. If you've read my guide called messing about with
life, you'll know that they are the building blocks of life. And yes,
they're in trouble because of what people are doing to them. This is
partly because of and partly because of something called the gene pool.
Genetic engineering
could make matters even worse because the world could come to depend on
even fewer varieties of food crops. And all these will be controlled by
the big corporations who will own the seeds - and even be able to stop them
growing properly if they haven't been sprayed with special chemicals which,
of course, they will also own.
| But supposing human
scientists aren't quite as clever as they think they are and nature
plays a trick on them by creating some new type of plague (yes this
happens all the time because of evolution) which wipes out one or
two of these 'genetically pure' crops all across the world, you could
end up with an Irish on a huge scale. |
The common sense solution
is to learn from nature and be sure to preserve that wonderful mix of
genes which gives us all that even more wonderful variety of life.
Try
my Wrecking the Planet Quiz
to see how you're doing.
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Life really is in peril
If a comet hits the planet and causes big trouble for life like it did
66 million years ago in the fifth mass extinction, nobody is to blame.
Comets aren't alive and they don't think.
But people do think and that, perhaps, has turned out to be more dangerous
for other life than any comet. It is 'thinking people' ('wise man' Homo
sapiens – huh!) that are bringing about this frightening mass extinction.
Not mindless comets or volcanoes.
Anyone with a little vision can see the indicator traffic lights are on
red. But hardly anybody seems to be looking – particularly not politicians
and the people who run corporations. 
If lots of people drive cars and don't stop at the traffic lights, you
know what happens: there's a huge crash and people get hurt or killed.
Well that's what is starting to happen to our planet and its life. So
why don't people care? Why are they trashing the planet with their ? Why are they already gobbling nearly half of the world's available
food energy supply?
 
And
what
do
you
think?
Try
my Big Feet Quiz
and see how well you score!
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What you Kids can do about it
Today,
you kids hold the future of the whole planet in your hands. It is you
who inherit the Earth. Adults - including your parents and family - are
doing the damage today because many of them simply don't realise what
they are doing to the planet. But you do! So what you choose to do as
you get older can make a big difference.
Here's what you can do to start the ball rolling:
At home and at school
-
Recycle
everything
you
can.
start
waste
food,
vegetable
peelings
and stuff.
wear
your clothes
more
than
once
before
you
wash
them.
use energy-efficient light bulbs, shower heads
etc. Don't take baths.
They
waste
water
and
energy.
-
have
vacation fun near home so you don't have to do loads of travelling -
particularly on airplanes. They are
mega-polluters
-
grow
some of
your
own
organic
food.
- get
your parents to live closer to their work (or the other way around)
and near your school. Then none of you has to
travel
so
much.
- use
bicycles and buses rather than cars. Walk even.

buy items made or grown locally rather than from
far away. This cuts out ''. Also, try my shoppers'
quiz to see how
ecofriendly
you
are.
if
you have a back yard or garden at home, see if you can make a pond.
And how about making a wildlife refuge too? You know, somewhere for
birds to nest (make bird boxes) with bushes and small trees - even heaps
of sticks and leaves where small animals can hibernate in the winter.
A tidy neat garden is not a good place for wildlife - especially if
you spray
and use artificial fertilisers.
-
find
out more about our beautiful planet and remember that you have to share
it with around 15 million other life forms (),
all of which have a .
-
form
a local club with your friends, parents and school teachers. Get people
who know about ecology to come and talk. Raise funds to help Earth-friendly
charities like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network,
Survival, Sierra Club - there are lots.
Good luck!
The future of all of us depends on what you kids of today do to make sure
tomorrow comes for people, penguins and polar bears…
What do you think
about about life in danger? Have you any good ideas about what we can do to make things
better? If you do, please write to me. As long as your message is sensible
and friendly, I promise to reply. I will also put your message on my Friends
page. Click
to email me now! Please don't delete the subject line of your email which should read: "Life in danger message for Tiki".
| Click
here to go to my Life in Danger links
page to find out about groups concerned at what people are doing
to all other Life on Earth. |
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