Loss of wolves changes Canadian ecosystem

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study By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
Mon Aug 1, 3:08 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The loss of once-plentiful wolves in a part of Canada's west allowed the elk population to mushroom, pushing out beavers and songbirds and showing the importance of top predators, Canadian researchers said on Monday.

Although scientists have long noted that the loss of even one species can have profound effects, the report is one of the first large-scale studies to show clearly the widespread consequences of losing a predator at the top of the food chain.


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=2&u=/nm/20050801/sc_nm/environment_wolves_dc

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1. Over 100 species go extinct every day.

Is it even possible anymore to stop this trend? Sometimes it seems hopeless.

The Politics of Extinction

We are at the present time living in an age of mass extinction. Each year, more than 20,000 unique species disappear from this planet forever. This represents more that two species per hour,

Species extinction is the fuel that supports the ever increasing progress of the machinery of civilization. The human species, reproducing with the malevolent design of a cancer cell is mindlessly pursuing growth for the sake or growth alone.

Individual humans are for the most part insulated from the reality of species loss. Alienated from the natural world, wrapped in a cocoon of material pleasures, guided by anthropocentric attitudes, the average human being is unaware and non-caring about the biological holocaust that is transpiring each and every day.

The facts are clear. More plant and animal species will go through extinction within our generation than have been lost thorough natural causes over the past two hundred million years. Our single human generation, that is, all people born between 1930 and 2010 will witness the complete obliteration of one third to one half of all the Earth's life forms, each and every one of them the product of more than two billion years of evolution. This is biological meltdown, and what this really means is the end to vertebrate evolution on planet Earth.
http://www.sumeria.net/earth/extinct.html