As we celebrate Earth Day, we ask "what are we really doing to protect life on our planet?" In the past approximately 20 years, we have lost 1,200,000 square miles of natural lands globally, approximately an area of the size of India. In the United States, we lose roughly a football field of wild land every 30 seconds. With an ever-expanding human population, we have destroyed massive amounts of habitat to build housing, extract the earth's resources like timber and fossil fuels and grow food, particularly animal flesh. We are left with rapidly shrinking islands of intact ecosystems alongside hundreds of thousands of acres of monoculture crops (soy, corn, etc.), confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and clear-cut former forests. That leaves far fewer places for humans and animals to take refuge from the effects of climate change. It also reduces our ability to deal with climate change itself as forests and other ecosystems with the ability to absorb greenhouse gas emissions are wiped out at an ever-increasing rate.