[rosser]

Ecosystems are massively interdependent. There is necessarily an inflection point where an ecosystem is so depleted that it can't carry itself any more, let alone us. That's called "collapse" and it tends to be permanent.

Species are currently going extinct at a rate we've previously only seen in the fossil record — from which we've estimated that the current rate of species extinction to be on the order of 10-100 times that of any previous extinction event.

Then, consider that there are key roles in an ecosystem, without which its collapse is more or less a certainty. One of those roles is pollinating.

The collapse of bee and butterfly populations, and our having to resort to commercial pollination (because something on the order of 3/4 of the world's food plants require pollinators, and many of the essential nutrients — things the body can't synthesize itself, and must obtain through diet — come from plants which critically depend on pollinators, while wild bee populations have fallen to alarming levels) is a dangerous leading indicator.

We're well on the path towards a collapse. If we don't avert it, things will not go well for us. When the things we eat all die, they aren't there for us to eat any more. When that happens, we die.

How is this not flashing neon obvious?

[lopmotr]

Life on Earth has never been wiped out, no matter how bad it got. And we're not even talking about glaciers over every continent bad (humans survived that), just less fish and some other things. Not even always making them extinct, just less of each species. You're assuming that if we carry on without worrying about it, we will make important species extinct. That's only an assumption and not obvious.