Give it a try.

Let’s try to paint or color your home or your yard, or maybe a garden or the rainforest, or underneath the ocean.  

But let’s not use any yellow. WAIT!  What colors does yellow make?  We can’t use any of those either….  We wouldn’t be able to use green because green is made with yellow + blue.  And we wouldn’t be able to use brown because brown is made with many colors, including yellow.  And we couldn’t use orange because orange is made with red + yellow.  

So everything that should be green would be blue and everything that should be brown would be purple. And everything that was yellow would be grey. It could be beautiful, but we would miss the sun, and miss the green grass. Bananas would be grey, and so would pencils. It would feel like a dark winter all the time. This is because every color is important. If we lost one, we would lose the whole beautiful spectrum.  And there would be no more rainbows!

This is just a METAPHOR (an example and a way to explain things) of what it could be like if we started losing any living things for good in our eco systems. 

This is actually happening right now in our coral reefs!