" the former head of Yale’s School of Forestry writes in the introduction to his latest book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Half the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated ninety percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now over-fished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone and another twenty percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. "

― Bill McKibben , The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change