UN environmental chief: “We are destroying life on Earth”

“This meeting is part of the world’s efforts to address a very simple fact — we are destroying life on Earth,” Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, said at the opening of the meeting in Nagoya, central Japan.

Scientists warn that unless people start doing more to protect species, extinctions will spike and the intricately interconnected natural world will be damaged with devastating consequences…

“We’re on the verge on the major extinction spasm,” said Russ Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and a field biologist who has spent decades studying primates and reptiles. “Healthy ecosystems are the underpinnings of human development.”