Dispatches from the Vanishing World

50 acres of tropical rainforest 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. (This particularly unfortunate type of extinction is known as Sentinelan extinction.) 2000 of the world's 6000 remaining languages have less than 12 speakers and will be lost within this generation. The world's cultural and biological 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, or the advance or retraction of an ice sheet, but our very success as a species. Human population growth and the spread of modern culture are 1doing in the planet. 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.

Dispatches from the Vanishing World is a forum for documenting and raising 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. It provides foundations involved in environmental or cultural preservation with two services: 1) a full, independent assessment of their program or cause, and 2) publicity by adapting the assessment for publication in one of the top American magazines or as a book.

This is a reader's website. The Dispatches will be long and thorough, because often these places where species and/or cultures 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.

http://www.dispatchesfromthevanishingworld.com/index.html

The expression "doing in" (ref. 1) means