Local conservationist turned TV star Jeff Corwin takes his animal-rescue message to the New England Aquarium this week with the release of a dramatic book and documentary on some of the world’s most endangered species.

Corwin’s book, “100 Heartbeats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endangered Species,” focuses on the few species that have joined the “100 heartbeats club,” a phrase describing animal populations with 100 or fewer living in the wild.

“It’s kind of the ultimate club you don’t want to join,” said Corwin, 42, a Norwell native who lives in Marshfield and has hosted shows on the Travel Channel, Food Network and Animal Planet. He noted a species goes extinct every 20 minutes.

“Well within our lifetimes, we will have lost half the planet’s life,” he said in the aquarium’s medical lab, while examining a critically endangered Kemp’s ridley turtle rescued off Corporation Beach in Dennis on Oct. 17. “But sometimes there’s a disconnect. You would never think New England is a keystone feature in the conservation of this species, but here it is.”

Corwin will hold a launch party and public book signing at the aquarium on Thursday, and an accompanying documentary will run on MSNBC on Nov. 22.

“We’ve reached this critical junction,” he said. “I feel this is the project I’ve spent my whole life working toward.” He spent the last year revisiting the animals he has encountered throughout his career in order to tell their stories.

He said the project is less academic than his previous books.

“I wanted to find a way to intimately tell the story of extinction. It’s a drama,” he said. “I wanted to take the reader on a thrill ride.”

In both the book and documentary, he said humans play the role of villain and hero. While these species’ crises are manmade - pollution, poaching, habitat destruction and so on - conservation efforts have paid off in a huge way.

People have been responsible for bringing some animals back from the brink of extinction, such as the bald eagle and Kemp’s ridley turtle, which dropped to only a few hundred in the 1980s, said aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse. The turtles now number upwards of 10,000 thanks to efforts from groups such as the aquarium, which rescues 25 to 150 each fall and has released 500 to 600 into the wild.

“If I felt it was too late, I would not have written this book,” Corwin said. “We’re at the last stand.”

Here are excerpts from Corwin’s book, published by Rodale:

Force of habitat

The habitat loss afflicting tigers illustrates the struggle facing all of the world’s big cats, as well as their smaller cousins, including the Florida panther and the Iberian lynx. Globally, only about 3,500 tigers live in the wild. In India, land of the tiger, that number is about 1,660 - and falling.

“Tigers are territorial and require substantial land to survive,” said Mahendra Shrestha, director of the Save the Tiger Fund. “Habitat loss just gets worse as the human population increases.”

Tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars share a common ancestor that lived 5 million years ago and was similar to a modern leopard. As evolution proceeded, these cats became bigger and fiercer creatures. Our ancestors hunted their ancestors, the saber-toothed tiger, and it hunted early humans.

In India, tigers roamed freely through the forests until as recently as the 1950s. The Caspian tiger - the animal often pitted against gladiators in Roman arenas - became extinct in the 20th century. It had prowled throughout Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the Russian Caucasus Mountains.

As predators at the top of the food chain, the tigers’ disappearance causes dramatic changes in the environment. With the lessened threat of these carnivores, the animals that serve as their traditional prey overbreed. Foragers - like a deer I observed escaping from a tiger during a trip to India - overrun the habitat and throw the natural order out of balance.

“When you save the tiger, you save the entire ecosystem beneath him,” said Shrestha. “Preserving the tiger in his natural habitat means that the rest of the animals at the other end of the food chain survive, too.”

As I tracked tigers with Fateh I fell under the spell of these powerful, beautiful animals. The lion may be known as the king of beasts, but many cultures place the tiger at the top of the list when it comes to power, stealth and beauty.

Measuring up to 13 feet and weighing up to 660 pounds, tigers can jump twice their body length, lending them a forceful and deadly pounce. Some of the last wild refuges are in India and Nepal. In the early 1900s, the tiger population in India was 45,000; in 1972, it was put at 1,827. Poaching is a major reason.

Chinese medicines make much of tiger whiskers, fat, skin and bone as remedies for such ailments as rheumatism and impotence. The demand has created a lucrative market for the parts of many endangered animals and decimated the world’s tiger population.

Since economic gain is a major incentive for poaching, it needs to be a big part of the solution. On some reserves, conservationists have hired former poachers to protect tigers. Like criminal informants, they have proven to be effective scouts, pointing out the tricks of this ugly trade to help save tigers and prosecute their killers.

I’ve witnessed firsthand the devastation from poachers who “harvest” and sell tiger parts. In Southeast Asia, I went under cover and met a woman selling tiger pelts, fat, skin and bones. Struck by her apparent indifference to the animal parts strewn around her home, I asked, “What will you do when all of the tigers are killed and there are no more left? What will you do in a world where your son will never be able to see a living tiger?”

“I’ll take him to the zoo to see them there,” she answered calmly.

Fighting this widespread sentiment is a huge undertaking. “The important thing now is to get people to see tigers as worth more alive than dead,” Shrestha said.

Human touch

Nearly all the endangered Bornean orangutans that Birute M.F. Galdikas and her staff care for have been orphaned due to poaching. Poachers capture and kill orangutans to sell body parts on the black market and as bushmeat.

The newest addition when I arrived was a baby orangutan in such bad shape he was being given intravenous fluids. It would have been traumatic enough had this infant been orphaned by an accident, but, as with most of these orphans, it’s likely that his mother was slaughtered before his eyes and he was ripped from her arms by poachers.

Humans and orangutans share much in common, which was painfully evident as I held this baby orangutan. As I cradled him in my arms, I couldn’t imagine the horror he had endured. With his eyes fixed on mine, he reached up to touch my face - a gesture that reminded me of my daughters when they were babies. Within minutes, he fell asleep in my arms.

This 9-pound orangutan would need to spend six to eight years mastering the skills to live in the wild. Until an orangutan is 3 years old it’s dependent on its mother and clings to her as she swings through the trees. Because orangutans have such a long “childhood,” orangutans in the wild have only one infant every seven or eight years.

To illustrate the process of rescue, rehab and rewilding, Galdikas chose Moktar, an adult orangutan who had completed forest training with other orangutans. Able to swing with grace through the high canopy of the forest trees, he was ready to go it alone. So I joined in a journey down a remote river with the freedom-bound orang in a catch-and-release cage under a hellish midday heat.

On arrival, Moktar shifted in his cage. We said a short blessing in Indonesian, and the cage door flew open. I can honestly say it was one of the most meaningful moments of my life as a naturalist to watch this creature with the strength of eight men - the largest of the tree-living primates - find his way back into his own wild world.

One branch at a time, he mounted into the canopy and sailed through the trees on his elegantly long, red-furred arms, his grunting cries growing fainter as he made his way deep into the jungle. The creatures have an intelligence you can feel. Maybe that’s why orangutan means “person of the forest” in Indonesian.

Before an orangutan can be reintroduced, he must learn to identify hundreds of edible plants. An orangutan orphan needs to learn to live independently, and part of that is learning the rules of territoriality, which are different for males and females. With creatures this complex, rehabilitation requires a staggering investment of time and money.

The rising demand for palm oil, derived from a local palm fruit, is causing the destruction of tropical forests in Sumatra and Borneo, which are being cleared to set up plantations. Palm oil is used in packaged food products like cookies, crackers, frozen dinners, low-fat dairy products and candies as well as in soap and cosmetics. Incredibly, 1 out of 10 products available at a U.S. or European supermarket contains palm oil. And it’s one of the region’s most abundant and lucrative resources.

When workers slash and burn forests for palm oil production, they often kill, maim or entrap orangutans. When the mothers are caught in traps, their babies are taken from their arms to be sold and the mothers are killed.

The Indonesian government has put a stop to most illegal logging, but palm oil concessions continue to rip apart the forest at a rate that will leave Bornean orangutans without any habitat by 2012.

I ask Galdikas what it is that continues to draw her to this primate that is at once so much like and so different from humankind.

“Its gentleness,” she said. “There’s a gentleness there that surpasses anything that humans are capable of. You can turn your back on an orangutan. Their friendship can span species. You gaze into their eyes and you know you are dealing with an intelligence equal to your own.”

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