I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.
I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.
Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.
Nature itself ain't in no long term stasis, its just us humans projecting our wishful thinking on our environment. Planet is warming since last ice age (ie all glaciers in the Alps are provably receding since 1850 when measurements started, and ie vineyard region where I live was provably under huge glacier some 25k years ago).
Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).
Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.
Agreed, we(collectively) do seem to assume and teach that the environment is/was in homeostasis before modern man when that is very much not the case.
However we do have measurable effects on the environment i.e. acid rain on the east coast due to the iron and steel foundries. We eliminated/reduced that heavily by implementing controls, same with the hole in the ozone.
I don't think that the path forward for repairing(if assuming all manmade)/changing what is going on is banning things as that is difficult to implement on the world wide scale that it would need to happen.
Case in point, China is one of the largest GHG emitters in terms of number but when it is brought up, the argument is they are smaller per capita and most of the emissions are due to them selling to the west anyway. If we said "Ok, let's stop manufacturing there", now you have the free trade people upset. Also the people who believe that you need trade in order to prevent war. Also everyone really likes cheap stuff, the man on the street may not care about who their senator is but they really like it when they can get very big TV for cheap. So it's politically untenable.
I think that we could do some Geo-engineering to reverse/fix the situation; carbon sequestration in the ocean, greening the Sahara. But then you have people worried about the second order effect, it costs money and who will pay and you may be doing it on someone else's land...Europe doing a big push to green the Sahara would be bad optics because of colonialism.
I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned.
"I think we will take action but unfortunately it will have to be after things get a lot worse because that is really the only way to get people aligned."
Isn't this accelerationism?