The word extinction has shown up several times in the news lately regarding the population status of some wildlife species.  All too often we can identify species that have been deemed extinct, but we are not given an explanation of how this came to be.  Historically, or I should say prehistorically, we know that a meteor striking the earth and an ice age contributed to the extinction of thousands of species.  Note that these catastrophic events were natural disasters.  However, what about the extinctions as of late?  Internationally, we still experience natural disasters all the time, but what is their …