The Little Book of Shocking Eco Facts

A couple weeks ago, Fast Company brought you a sneak peak at The Little Book of Shocking Global Facts, a slim but striking volume filled with illustrations of unbelievable facts.

This October, the publisher, Fiell, is releasing a successor: The Little Book of Shocking Eco Facts, by Mark Crundwell and Cameron Dunn, with illustrations by Barnbrook Design. We've got an exclusive preview of what the book will look like; here's a taste:

Up top: In the mountain forests of the Colombian Andes, 1/3 of bird species have gone extinct in the last 80 years.

Raw rain forest, if it's simply stripped and converted to pasture, is worth about $150 per hectare per year. But if it's used instead for sustainable uses, that figure rises to $1175:

Singapore is a microcosm of ecological collapse: Since it was first colonized, it has lost 99.8 percent of its forest cover, and 26 percent of its natural species:

Light bulbs account for 25 percent of all the electricity we use; 75 percent of that could be saved by switching from incandescent bulbs to CFLs:

Methane concentration in the atmosphere has gone up by 148 percent since 1750, and methane, as a greenhouse gas, has been shown to be 21 times more harmful carbon dioxide:

11 of the 18 species of penguin are suffering population declines; seven are classified as vulnerable; and four are endangered:

The ocean absorbs massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. As a result, since 1800, the ocean's pH has dropped to from 8.2 to 8.1 — and the ocean's life is extraordinarily fine tuned to water acidity. If current trends continue, the ocean's pH will be 7.8 by 2070:

You can pre-order the book for just $10 from Amazon now.

Story by Cliff Kuang, originally published August 2010 on Fast Company.