If there’s one thing this year’s election has done superbly, is marginalize the bigger stories. While the rest of America is YouTubing Tina Fey’s dead on impression of Gov. Sarah Palin, the chances of my grandchildren watching Walt Disney’s The Lion King and then getting the chance to scream “Simba!” outside the lion’s den at the zoo are diminishing.

The International Union for the Conversation of Nature, located in Gland Switzerland, released a study that one out of four mammals are in danger of facing extinction. Granted the lions may not be one of the major groups facing their curtain call, it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

According to the IUCN, out of the 44,838 species cataloged in the study, exactly 16,928 have a high chance of being wiped off the face of the Earth.

Our environmental state is pretty grim. Global warming is one of the scarier issues that has been floating around. But the literal disappearance of a large chunk of the earth’s population of mammals is pretty disturbing. I mean, seriously, my generation hasn’t gone through some mass animal extinction. Sure, you hear about it happening but when you hear someone say, the era of the hippo may be up – it doesn’t quite jive together in my head.

I realize that the well being of the animal population isn’t one of the top issues on the agenda of any of our leaders. But I promise you, if we have an experience similar to the movie Star Trek: The Voyage Home when some weird, floating, soup can shaped spacecraft comes looking for extinct pig and causes an insane weather storm, I think we’ll all be kicking ourselves for not doing something sooner.

Maybe we should just save ourselves the grief to do what Noah did and gather two of each mammal, and take them to a remote area untouched by man. Because we all know the human race is probably the reason why these animals are facing extinction in the first place. The sad part, we’re equally likely to disappear off the face of the Earth. But in our case, we’re in a steady flow of denial to the point where we won’t know it till it actually happens.
—Eming Piansay