Description

In this lavishly illustrated book, author, artist and ecologist Simon Mustoe explains the scale and importance of wildlife for a habitable Earth.

What will happen to us if animals become extinct? Why do we need to conserve endangered species? These rarely answered questions could be among the most important for us to understand, if we are to survive as a species.

It's a fundamental law of nature that wild animals are the most likely lifeforms to minimise ecological chaos, yet in the last fifty years we've killed almost three quarters of them. Without abundant and diverse wildlife, we cannot stabilise the ecosystems on which we depend.

Animal Impact is the measure of how much wildlife is responsible for making Earth habitable for humans. Wild animals turn dust into soil, carbon into food and the weather into a fair climate for living.

Decades of mistreatment of wildlife has made conservation critical to our future but we still haven't grasped how strongly our fate is bound to the fate of all other animals like us.