Biodiversity is high.

The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent.14

The huge increase in biodiversity during the last 100 million years massively outweighs the species lost in past mass extinctions. The number of genera, a measure of biodiversity more powerful than species count alone, has nearly tripled over the course of this time period.15 After each of these past five mass extinctions, the biodiversity in the fossil record dips between 15 to 20 percent, but each extinction is followed by much larger growth.16

Some say the erroneous claims of a sixth mass extinction undermine conservation efforts. “To a certain extent they’re claiming it as a way of frightening people into action when in fact, if it’s actually true that we’re in a sixth mass extinction, then there’s no point in conservation biology,” noted one scientist. “People who claim we’re in the sixth mass extinction don’t understand enough about mass extinctions to understand the logical flaw in their argument.”17

Conservationists, it turns out, are skilled at maintaining small populations of animals, from yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand to mountain gorillas of central Africa. The real challenge is expanding the size of their populations.

It’s not the case that humankind has failed to conserve habitat. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected, an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface.18 The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 [244,000] in 2020.19