The root cause of extinction can be named in 6 words: too many humans, too many desires. These two are largely tabooed, including in many international organizations.

Yet they have severe consequences:

• Expanding the exploitation of land and sea, especially for food
• Direct exploitation (building settlements and traffic lines, cutting forests, ploughing grasslands, overfishing the oceans)
• Climatic change (a slower but growing impact)
• Pollution
• Invasive species and pathogens spread by human activities

A key driver of biodiversity loss is our food system, notably the extremely high land use for livestock bred for (excessive) meat consumption.

Another key cause for losing species is human-made fragmentation of habitats. The smaller and less connected a habitat, the fewer species it can sustain. This connection is logarithmic (and dependent on the type of ecosystem and the type of species). A 50% reduction of viable habitat results in a roughly 10% loss of species; a 90% reduction of habitat in a 50% loss of species.

 

Extinction is real. Here are just a few arbitrary examples of precious genomes lost forever. Each of these species played a role in its ecosystem, which after losing it has changed irreversibly.