The Hawai'ian Islands exist in the most profound oceanic isolation on the face of the globe, more than 2,000 miles from the closest continental land mass. Over 70 million years of isolation, and habitats ranging from alpine deserts to tropical rain forests and coastal dunes, allowed for the evolution of over 10,000 unique life forms found nowhere else on Earth.

For 70 million years lava upwelling from the ocean floor created a chain of islands that were gradually colonized by life: tiny insects and spores borne on the jet stream, birds blown off their migratory paths by high winds, plant seeds in bird droppings and feathers. Only once in every 100,000 years did a new species successfully navigate 2,500 miles of salt water and come ashore to establish itself here.

Slowly these colonists evolved in to an array of new life forms often very unlike their continental ancestors. Among them, the birds dominated the land -- a land with only two mammals (a bat and a seal), no reptiles, no land amphibians, and free of many diseases and competing life forms left behind on the continents. As these new life forms evolved, they built up soil; soil trapped moisture; moisture promoted more growth; and this verdant growth influenced the climate. Over time, evolution created rain forests, shrublands, grasslands, and more than 100 other distinct "natural communities" of interdependent plants and animals spread over Hawai'i's all-encompassing spectrum of environmental conditions. And so the life song of the islands built to a symphony ... but eventually extinction began to take its toll.

Extinction is a natural process. But in Hawai'i it began accelerating 1,500 years ago with the arrival of the Polynesians and then accelerated even more in the late 1700's with the arrival of the Europeans. Today, extinction rates are thousands of times greater than the natural rate. If we are to save what it left, today's unnatural rates of extinction cannot continue.

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