You, your friends and teachers, your grandparents have never seen a dodo. The last of these large birds that couldn't fly died many years ago and now it is extinct. We even say "as dead as a dodo", which means "finished". Your
great-grandparents may just have seen a passenger pigeon: the last one
died in 1914. A lot more endangered species — fish, reptiles, insects,
birds, mammals — may disappear before you have children. The reason is
Man that kills animals and destroys their habitats.
It is not just animals that are in danger, so are plants. The world had
over nine million sq. km. of forests and this is a lot of trees, also a
lot of different species of trees but they are disappearing fast becouse every day we use paper and cardboard, both made from wood, we also use different kinds of wood in furniture and in other ways. Every year over 100 000 sq. km. of forests are cleared for different
uses, and a lot of forests are so badly damaged that they will hardly be
able to recover. If we go on like this, by the time you are as old as
your grandparents are now all the forests on earth like rainforests in South America, Africa and Asia can be destroyed. The huge forests help to control the world's weather, and to produce
much of the oxygen in the air. There are many illnesses which we still
cannot cure like cancer2 and AIDS. It
may be that the medicines we need will be discovered in wild plants in
savannas, deserts or rainforests and if we destroy these places, we will
never find the cure.
So you see, that it is not just children who need a healthy space to
live and grow and if we want our lives to be healthy and interesting, a lot
of other creatures and plants need growing space too.