The Science Of The Next 150 Years: 100 Years in the Future

The first projection of species extinctions came in 1980—a prediction I made in a report for then president Jimmy Carter. It concluded that the pace at which we were losing tropical forests to logging and development would cause the extinction of 15 to 20 percent of all species by 2000. The calculation was not far off. Today's Red List of Threatened Species, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, estimates that 13 percent of bird, 25 percent of mammal and 41 percent of amphibian species face possible extinction.

This article was originally published with the title A Tsunami of Extinction.

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