Extinction.

The Anthropocene includes a plethora of manifestations in terms of the activities of humanity and the translation of those into a variety of environmental repercussions [16]. The former are represented by a set of socio-economic variables underlying growth, including, for example, the growth rate of the number of vehicles, of fertilizer consumption, of water consumption, of the number of dams, of fast-food mega-businesses, or total world gross domestic product (GDP) (see magnitudes of change in [16]). The accelerated growth rate of these socio-economic variables is driven by an explosive human population growth, particularly in countries or regions of countries where the consumption of resources is inordinately wasteful. That is, civilization is living now under a syndrome of too many people, with those in ‘developed’ parts of the world consuming an unfair share of Earth's resources and all together using an unsustainable fraction of our planet's natural capital (defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity as the world's stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things; https://www.cbd.int/business/projects/natcap.shtml). Humanity in many parts of the world is overconsuming, writing cheques heedlessly on our biological resource banks and disregarding the declining balance of natural capital rather than living more frugally on its ‘interest'.

The environmental translation of these socio-economic drivers includes the correspondingly accelerated rate of greenhouse emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide), leading to climate disruption on land and in oceans. Such climatic disruption encompasses global warming, with dramatic snow- and ice-thawing from polar and high-elevation lands and consequent global sea-level rise, ocean acidification and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events (see [14,17]). Despite the active disinformation efforts of deniers (often sponsored by big corporations and special interest groups, in particular the fossil fuel industry; see https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-machine-how-fossil-fuel-industry-blocks-climate-action), climate change-related calamities do manage to make their way into mainstream media, including movies and documentaries. This is understandable, given the increasingly vivid, short-term catastrophic consequences on humans (and their infrastructures) around the world. However, this is not the only global environmental change of the Anthropocene. Land-use change, over-drafting of soils and groundwater, rampant terrestrial and aquatic toxification, the proliferation of invasive organisms (plants, animals and pathogenic microbes) and, especially, the intimately connected loss of biodiversity are also grave manifestations of the Anthropocene [14,18].

Here we are concerned with the latter, which is one of the most critical manifestations of the Anthropocene. Save for the ethically and ecologically unsound arguments of de-extinction advocates (see [19]), the loss of biological diversity is irreversible on a time scale of interest to humanity. The loss of biodiversity could ultimately become the most pervasive global environmental change our species will face, since all taxa that have disappeared from Earth will be gone forever. Biodiversity loss is both a cause and a consequence of global environmental change. Therefore, our destruction of the global biological richness on which we utterly depend represents an unprecedented threat to the existence of civilization that could even threaten the persistence of humanity.