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With rising pollution, habitat destruction, and the disturbance wrought by climate change, the toll on wildlife has been enormous. A third of all amphibians, at least a fifth of all mammals, and an eighth of all bird species are now threatened with extinction. “The Global Biodiversity Outlook,” a UN report, concluded:

In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of Earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago.³⁴

Some species play critical roles in the healthy functioning of natural systems; we depend on them for our survival. Microscopic plankton in the oceans, for example, is the food that fish depend on; these plankton also produce much of the oxygen we breathe. When carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is absorbed by the oceans, it makes the seawater more acidic, harming the plankton. The combination of ocean acidity and warming water has already led to a dramatic decline in the global population of plankton.³⁵ If this decline continues, we don’t know at what point it will yield catastrophic consequences — such as the collapse of fish life or a substantial reduction in the oxygen available to us.