During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. Today there is a species that should know it is not able to wait millions of years for its life-support systems to be restored after a mass extinction. Ironically, the scale that species’ activities is the sole cause of today’s biological holocaust.
What is crystal clear is that the trajectory of the dimming future of civilization will be directed in part not just by the overall loss of biodiversity but by the pattern of our mutilation of the tree of life.
Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120)
