Land Use Linked to Mass Species Extinction

"As many as 1,700 species are facing extinction in the next half-century, thanks to humans reshaping their natural habitats," reports Chase Purdy.

That news delivered in a study by Yale researchers published recently in the Nature Climate Change journal. The study lists species, including many that will be familiar to the layperson, according to Purdy: "monarch butterflies, red-crowned cranes, bearcats, and Siamese crocodiles—all of them threatened by the same, almost-certain doom."

The complicity spreads beyond the geographic reach of the extinctions: "even if some of the animals live in remote parts of the planet, people in the the [sic] developing world are still complicit in their demise. The demand for tropical hardwood floors, palm oil, and soybeans—among other things—fundamentally reshapes habitats so drastically that life for many of these animals becomes too tough to navigate."