Racing Extinction event Aug 1 2015 at the Empire State Building. Image by Joel Sartore (rights reserved)

Don’t miss Racing Extinction  —  airs worldwide on Discovery December 2 (US, 9 pm ET/PT, 8pm Central). Academy-Award-winning director Louie Psihoyos is a man on a mission to keep thousands of species — from grasshoppers and butterflies to megafauna – from becoming part of the “Sixth Mass Extinction”. Psihoyos know firsthand just how much is at stake, since he has sneaked his cameras into many wildlife meat-markets and backroom illegal pet-trade markets on several continents to document what’s going on. “Wildlife trafficking,” he says, “is second only to the drug trade” as a lucrative source of income and products –whether poached meat, ivory, rhino horn or live pets– for voracious appetites from Africa to China.

“Time is running out,” says Psihoyos, “to save species. It is not a spectator sport.”

In August, Psihoyos and his good friend Joel Sartore, also a National Geographic photographer, used Sartore’s stunning images from his decade-long Photo Ark project, to illuminate the side of the Empire State Building – breathtaking, amusing, and frightening.  The goal was to preview Racing Extinction, and jolt people into understanding what’s at stake. Thousands watched below on the street as 30 stories of projected wildlife came to life on the iconic Manhattan skyscraper.  Thousands more around the world watched live via social media. Sartore’s photos are now installed at National Geographic’s Museum in Washington DC, where it takes 2 hours to watch the multi-media walls run a continuous showing of some 4,000 animals from his ark.

An endangered Indian rhinoceros female with calf (Rhinoceros unicornis) at the Fort Worth Zoo. (Image ID: ANI050-00091) Photo by Joel Sartore (All rights reserved)

A critically endangered red wolf (Canis rufus gregoryi) at the Great Plains Zoo. (Image ID: WOL006-00057) Joel Sartore. All rights reserved

Here’s Psihoyos’s call to action:  #StartWith1Thing for each and every one of us across the globe to make small changes in our lives that will have an impact on the places and practices that are killing off the species.

Here are things you can do:

Watch the Racing Extinction Documentary (Discovery TV)  on December 2

Take a Pledge to StartWith1Thing  (eat less meat, drive less, don’t buy wild etc)

Learn about extinction: Here’s a good book  The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Book review by New York Times

Meet the filmmakers and the “cast”  Louie Psihoyos, Joel Sartore and others

Stay in touch via Twitter #RacingXtinction and at #StartWith1Thing

REMEMBER Extinction is forever!