Biodiversity nears 'point of no return'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8461727.stm

Our ecological footprint - what we take out of the planet - is now 1.3 times the biological capacity of the Earth.

Perverse subsidies and the lack of value attached to the services provided by ecosystems have been factors contributing to their loss. What we cannot cost, we don't value - until it has gone.

Overfishing has reduced blue fin tuna numbers to 18% of what they were in the mid-1970s.

World's biodiversity 'crisis' needs action, says UN

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8449506.stm

With species extinctions running at about 1,000 times the "natural" or "background" rate, some biologists contend that we are in the middle of the Earth's sixth great extinction - the previous five stemming from natural events such as asteroid impacts.