50 acres of tropical rain forest are said to be disappearing every minute. Millions of species of animals and plants around the world are going extinct at an ever-accelerating rate, many of them before they can even be identified or their existence is even known.  2000 of the world’s 6000 languages have less than 12 speakers and will be lost within this generation. The world’s biological and cultural diversity is under assault as never before in recorded history. What is the cause of the greatest extinction event in the last ten thousand years ? Not a meteor strike or a volcanic eruption, the advance or retraction of an ice sheet, but our very success as a species. Rapidly multiplying local people need land and its resources—wood for fuel, water, wild animals to eat, gold and diamonds and other minerals for income. The modern consumer society, particularly  the U.S., with its huge appetite for resources, its fast-changing technology and seductive lifestyle--  what Clause Levi-Strauss calls “progress with a little p and in the plural,” the journalist Simon Elegant “the cancer of modern life,” and the Persian intellectual Ahmad Fardid “Westoxication”—is wreaking no less havoc on ecosystems and traditional societies around the world.

       Dispatches From The Vanishing World was started in 2001 to raise consciousness about the world’s fast-disappearing biological and cultural diversity. It provides first-hand, in-depth reporting from the last relatively pristine places on earth, identifies who and what is destroying them, and who is engaged in the heroic  and often life-threatening struggle to save them. Readers from ninety –some countries now dip into the Dispatches every month. This is a reader’s Web site. The Dispatches are long and thorough, because often these places where species and/or culture are down to the wire are remote and hard to get to and dangerous to move around in, and this may be the only detailed treatment they get. 

The overall picture continues to get grimmer and grimmer. Resources across the board— trees, water, fish, oil, minerals—are projected to run out or be critically depleted by mid-century. Major life-support systems are strained to their carrying capacity and being subverted by global warming. The modern consumer society, based on producing stuff and getting people to buy it, is starting to flounder, running up against the fact that there are only so many raw materials on the planet. But at the same time, thousands of initiatives have been started to mitigate our collective impacts, by people who “get it” and are deeply concerned about the future of the world. . New ways of framing and measuring our impacts have been devised, like the carbon, ecological, and cultural footprints and he Environmental Performance Index, which ranks 141 countries according to how well they are taking care of their resources and natural heritage and how they are dealing with their waste and carbon.  These success stories and positive developments are also being covered by the Dispatches. At the same time, new information is constantly coming in that is  making some of Doomsday scenarios unlikely, showing that climate change is a far more complicated affair that just the result of human carbon emissions. As the state of the world deteriorates, knowledge about what is causing the deterioration and the political will to do something about it are growing. 
So it’s sort of a race for our own survival, and that of countless other forms of life, many of which have been around much longer than us.

Can we turn this thing around, or is it already too late ?