We lose something in the region of 40,000 species every year, 109 a day. One species will be extinct before you have finished reading this chapter.

This was what we were told 22 years ago when Norman Myers first published his book The Sinking Ark in 1979. The message was relayed to the world at large in the official US environment report Global 2000. After this it became part of our shared consciousness: Former US vice-president Al Gore repeats the figure of 40,000 species in his Earth in the Balance, the popular science magazine Discover tells us that half the species we know today will be extinct within the next 100 years, and the famous Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson points out that we are losing between 27,000 and 100,000 species a year. Not to be outdone, professor Paul Ehrlich even estimated in 1981 that we lose some 250,000 species every year, with half of the Earth's species gone by the year 2000 and all gone by 2010–25.

Although these assertions of massive extinction of species have been repeated everywhere you look, they simply do not equate with the available evidence.