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.

The consequences for humans are high—lower air and water quality, loss of soil and consequently the ability to produce nutritious food and more extreme weather events resulting in floods and landslides. The consequences for wildlife may be even higher. Habitat loss and degradation is the largest driver of extinction in the United States and globally. In 2020, the United Nations said more than a million plant and animal species are heading toward extinction. Species are disappearing at hundreds to thousands of times the natural rate. For example, there are less than 400 North Atlantic right whales left, only about a dozen red wolves and likely around 10 vaquita porpoises. In the Southeast, extinction is becoming a foregone conclusion for 28% of the region's fishes, 48% of crayfish and nearly 70% of freshwater mussels.