This page explores how animal extinctions are becoming more common, and what the larger ecological impact would be. This issue is important to consider from a Christian ethics standpoint because God made us to be stewards, not predators, of creation, and because we are likely going to impact human life as well.

Out of Eden: A Christian Study and Action Guide to Food and the Environment

A practical Study and Action Guide for use by small groups discussion or personal reflection. The guide covers topics that are actionable on the personal and policy levels: sugar’s impact on our bodies and sugar corporations’ truth-telling and accountability, corn and corn subsidies creating over-supply, plastic and its biological impact on animals and humans, the true cost of meat in terms of soil depletion and air pollution, and food waste and the practices which can diminish it.

The Extinction Crisis (Center for Biological Diversity website)

Nature Needs Half, How Do We Achieve the Goal? (website)

Tyrone Hayes and Penelope Jagessar-Chaffer, The Toxic Baby. TEDWomen, Dec 2010.  Re: reproductive mutations in various animals, and impact on humans

Dina Spector, Scientists May Have Finally Pinpointed What's Killing All The Honeybees. Business Insider, May 13, 2014.

Fiona MacDonald, Mantis Shrimps Can See Cancer, and Scientists Have Now Created a Camera That Does the Same. Science Alert, Sep 26, 2014.  Research into the animal world often inspires human technology.

Chris Mooney, The Diversity of Life Across Much of Earth Has Plunged Below Safe Levels. Washington Post, Jul 14, 2016.

Jeremy Hance, Could We Set Aside Half the Earth for Nature? The Guardian UK, Jun 15, 2016.

Sophia DG, Sixth Wildlife Mass Extinction May Happen in 2020, Experts Say. Nature World News, Oct 27, 2016.

William Easterly, Michael Lewis’s ‘Brilliant’ New Book About Cognitive Bias. Wall Street Journal, Dec 5, 2016.  A review of Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. W.W. Norton & Company | Amazon page, Dec 6, 2016.

Damian Carrington, Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction Event Under Way, Scientists Warn. The Guardian UK, Jul 10, 2017.

Michael Greshko, Ground Zero of Amphibian 'Apocalypse' Finally Found. National Geographic, May 10, 2018.

Damian Carrington, Humans Just 0.01% of All Life But Have Destroyed 83% of Wild Mammals - Study. The Guardian UK, May 21, 2017.

Ed Yong, Animals Are Riding an Escalator to Extinction. The Atlantic, Oct 29, 2018.

Damian Carrington, Humanity Has Wiped Out 60% of Animal Populations Since 1970, Report Finds. The Guardian UK, Oct 29, 2018.

Ed Yong, Wait, Have We Really Wiped Out 60 Percent of Animals? The Atlantic, Oct 31, 2018.

Dominique Mosbergen, Insects Are Dying En Masse, Risking ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse Of Earth’s Ecosystems. Huffington Post, Feb 11, 2019.

Carl Zimmer, Birds Are Vanishing From North America. New York Times, Sep 19, 2019.  “The number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century, scientists find.”

John Iadarola, Trump’s EPA Devastates Bees in Record Numbers. The Damage Report, Oct 4, 2019.  Massive colony collapse.

Deutsche Welle, The Great Death of Insects.  DW Documentary, Oct 17, 2019.  

Catrin Einhorn, A ‘Crossroads’ for Humanity: Earth’s Biodiversity Is Still Collapsing. New York Times, Sep 15, 2020  “Countries have made insufficient progress on international goals designed to halt a catastrophic slide, a new report found.”

Shanna H. Swan, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Simon & Schuster, Feb 2021.  About endocrine disruptors.  See review by Nicholas Kristof, What Are Sperm Telling Us? New York Times, Feb 20, 2021. “Sperm counts have been dropping; infant boys are developing more genital abnormalities; more girls are experiencing early puberty; and adult women appear to be suffering declining egg quality and more miscarriages. It’s not just humans. Scientists report genital anomalies in a range of species, including unusually small penises in alligators, otters and minks. In some areas, significant numbers of fish, frogs and turtles have exhibited both male and female organs.”

Alexis Drutchas, What COVID and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Being Declared Extinct Have in Common. NBC News, Sep 29, 2021. “The proliferation of animal-borne diseases that ignite horrific pandemics will escalate so long as human activity continues to alter and destroy the delicate ecosystems of the natural world. We cannot afford to talk about Covid without talking about climate change, too.”

PBS News Hour, Compelling New Evidence Tracks COVID’s Origin to Wuhan Market.  PBS News Hour, Jul 27, 2022.  Not about animal extinction per se, but the impact of climate change and government policy on human-animal interaction. Interview with Angela Rasmussen, Canadian virologist, who published an article in the Journal of Science.  There is physical evidence of the virus at the live animal market from November and December of 2019.  Also, incidents of human infection clustered around the market, not the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Argues for two separate introductions at the market of SARS-COV-2 lineage A and B.  Although see Briahna Joy Grey, Robby Soave, Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky, Lab Leak Theory Not Debunked By New Studies Claiming Natural Origin. Rising | The Hill, Jul 28, 2022. The market was very close to the lab. The natural emergence theory actually looks worse for the Chinese government than the lab outbreak theory, because the Chinese government had promised to regulate live animal markets.  This raises the equally troubling concern that climate change is driving shifts in animal habitats and behavior, and therefore in human-animal interaction, and the need for global cooperation in health monitoring systems.

PBS News Hour, Trees Across the U.S. Face Dire Threats, New Report Shows.  PBS News Hour, Aug 28, 2022.  Due to invasive species, climate change, logging, etc.  

Leaf of Life, How Australia is Regreening its Deserts Back into a Green Oasis. Leaf of Life, Sep 18, 2022.

Despite the low population Australia is one of the worst developed countries in the world for broadscale deforestation, wiping out endangered forests and woodlands. In fact, they have cleared nearly half of all forest cover in the last 200 years!

It began in around the early 1800s when the British colonized Australia in search of land and fortunes. At that time Britain had already been completely stripped of trees for centuries by intensive agriculture and war, even today The United Kingdom has one of the lowest percentages of forest cover in Europe. British timber companies were granted free access to vast areas of virgin forest in Australia and trees were felled for agriculture and railway tracks which were constructed alongside other transit infrastructure such as roads, bridges and jetties.

By the 1880s concerns about stripping the forests were being raised but no steps towards conservation were taken and now Australia has become the worst offending country in the world for mammal extinctions, 55 wildlife species plus 37 plant species have gone extinct. The wide spread deforestation has resulted in 55% of all Australian land area being used for agricultural purposes and around 72% of all agricultural output is exported. Meat and live animals has been the fastest-growing export segment, growing 33% in value, However agriculture only accounts for 1.9% of value added (GDP) and 2.5% of employment in 2020–21.

The wide spread land degradation has resulted in man made desertification after centuries of tiling, and the introduction of non native grazing grasses has taken its toll on the landscape. However some regions in Australia are starting to turn this around, transforming large areas of degraded land back into bio-diverse ecosystems, by restoring millions of trees and in turn improving the lives for rural farming communities, as well as capturing over a million tons of carbon to benefit the planet as a whole. This can be considered a major accomplishment for any country, particularly one that has a low average rainfall of 16 inches per year. In this video we will show you how a 200km long green corridor will connect 12 nature reserves across a 10,000 km².

Leaf of Life, How Beavers Are Restoring Wetlands in North American Deserts! Leaf of Life, Sep 3, 2023.