ACCOMPANIED by a picture of two young apes cuddling each other, a Sunday supplement travel ad last weekend invited readers to visit "Borneo: Land of the Orang Utan".

It might well have added, tackily but with essential truth: Roll Up, Roll Up, Last Great Opportunity. For just three days before the ad appeared, a report by world's leading experts on apes predicted that most, including the Orang Utan, the bait to draw visitors to Borneo, face extinction within 20 years.

They are on the brink through habitat loss, civil war and hunting - all human activities. Two days later, another report, by the World Conservation Union, painted the wider extinction scenario.

Among the hundreds of endangered species are the white rhino, the Tibetan Antelope, the Chinese alligator, six species of turtle, 16 species of albatross, the Iberian Lynx, the Phillipine eagle, the sea otter and Hector's Dolphin, a New Zealand species. Should I go on? It's too distressing.

But let's face up to the situation here at home. North Sea cod and haddock are vanishing, and the sturgeon has virtually gone.

Songbirds are dwindling - skylark and yellowhammer down 60 per cent since 1975, the thrush by about 70 per cent. Even the humble house sparrow is becoming a rarity. In view of its close association with people, it could be our 'miners' canary'. But if we drive ourselves to extinction that will be our own stupid fault.

The loss of other species is shocking because it violates their right to live too.

The new millennium - this year or next, take your pick - has sparked countless reviews of the 20th Century. What will it chiefly be remembered for? On the positive side, penicillin and powered flight, perhaps? Negatively, the trenches and the Holocaust?

A new book, Something New Under the Sun, by JR McNeil (Allen Lane/Penguin £20) argues that to the future, if there is one, it is the devastation we humans have wreaked on our planet that will be the most significant factor of the last 100 years.

In his words: "I think this will appear as the most important aspect of 20th Century history, more so than World War Two, the communist enterprise, the rise of mass literacy, the spread of democracy, or the growing emancipation of women."

Will we head off this disaster? No.

Let's just take one small example. Did you know that aviation fuel is untaxed? That's why the ten-day Orang Utan spotting hoiliday in Borneo can be offered for just £699 - less than it costs my wife and I to spend a week in a Cornish holiday cottage. Since planes are a major cause of ozone depletion and greenhouse gases, their freedom from fuel tax, whatever its origins, can no longer be justified.

But of course the package holiday industry, and its millions of customers, would be up in arms over any tax. Our Government won't impose one even as a simple means of resolving the present fuel price crisis - ie, by lowering prices at the pumps and then recouping an equivalent amount in a long-overdue tax on aviation fuel.

So what hope for action for the environment, the natural world on which we all depend? None.

Headed by Monty Python's Life of Brian, a list of the top ten comedy films of all time, compiled by a specialist film magazine, doesn't include any film by Laurel and Hardy, WC Fields, the Marx Brothers, or (a personal favourite) Will Hay.

It's the best illustration yet of why I never attach any importance to any list. Still, this latest one has something to its credit. Also absent is any film by Charlie Chaplin, usually hailed as cinema's greatest comedy genius, but in fact the unfunniest funny man on celluloid.