Bad News/Insult to Injury/Good News on a Saturday Morning
The bad news is that within 50 years roughly half of all species will be lost, as we are in the midst of a great extinction--one of only six, now,that the world has ever seen. Ever. As in, the-last-one-wiped-out-the-dinosaurs ever, according to analysis of 2 new British studies that finally confirm statistically what has been predicted for several years: raiding the rainforest is a bad idea.

Adding insult to injury is that, to no surprise, this development is not the fault of overzealous coyotes just killing for power, or a special new bird with a voracious appetite for butterflies, or a lazy young generation of rabbits that simply don't take the time to procreate. No in fact it is human activity that has put us on pace to grow old in an ecologically "boring" world, in which "areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas."

The good news is that we humans know how to do some things right. Here's proof of that. If that doesn't inspire you to want to leave the world in better shape, maybe nothing will. I have to believe that with enough sparks like young Ian, and enough smiles like young Spencer's we may just find the collective will to not screw the whole place up in pursuit of, mostly, profit and power. Maybe that kind of hope is what would lead a journalist, on learning that the 6th great loss of species in the history of the world is underway, to give his article one of my new favorite headlines: "Mass Extinction Not Inevitable."