Let me try again:

http://nytimes.com/2022/09/16/opinion/conservation-ethics.html

Dear Foxy,

There is an unacceptable high rate of extinction at this time. I do not recommend ignoring it. I recommend recognising that extinction is a natural process which should be reduced when its rate is too high, but it has positive aspects. Consider the Great Oxidation Event.

Great Oxidation Event

“The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), also called the Great Oxygenation Event, the Oxygen Catastrophe, the Oxygen Revolution, and the Oxygen Crisis, was a time interval when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean first experienced a rise in the amount of oxygen. This occurred approximately 2.4–2.0 Ga (billion years) ago, during the Paleoproterozoic era. Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggests that biologically-produced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and changed it from a weakly reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen into an oxidizing atmosphere containing abundant oxygen.

The sudden injection of toxic oxygen into an anaerobic biosphere caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth. Although the event is inferred to have constituted a mass extinction, due in part to the great difficulty in surveying microscopic species' abundances, and in part to the extreme age of fossil remains from that time, the Oxygen Catastrophe is typically not counted among conventional lists of "great extinctions", which are implicitly limited to the Phanerozoic eon.

The event is inferred to have been caused by cyanobacteria producing the oxygen, which may have enabled the subsequent development of multicellular life-forms.”

The Great Oxidation Event caused a mass extinction of various species of cyanobacteria, but also resulted in an atmosphere that could support oxygen breathing forms of life such as our species and most species that inhabit this planet.

Those who recommend zero extinction are ignorant people who don’t recognize the role of extinction in evolution

david f & Foxy,

Spot-on assessments !

Dear David F.,

I get your point. By making room for new species
extinction helps drive the evolution of life.
We've had periods of mass extinction where large
percentages of the planet's species became extinct
in a relatively short amount of time due to widely
different causes.

In each of these cases the mass extinctions allowed
for new groups of organisms to thrive and diversify
which produced a range of new species. The demise
of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to thrive and
grow larger.

Today, scientists warn that because of human activities
such as pollution, over fishing, cutting down forests,
and so many other negative human activities, the earth
might be on the verge of (or already in) another mass
extinction.

If that is true - what new life will rise up to fill the
niche that we currently occupy?

Dear Foxy,

What new forms of life will arrive when our species trundles off to extinction? Humans are a terribly destructive species. We can design nuclear bombs and nonsense religions (redundant - all religions are nonsense.) . A shonky real estate dealer ex-president and a dictator seeking to recreate the glories of a totalitarian empire dominate the news. The news seems like bad fiction. However, think of what will disappear with our demise - rock & country music wailing, advertising jingles, Bible & Koran bashers, TV soaps & all the other detritus produced by a vulgar humanity.

If there still is life there will probably be predators and prey, social and anti-social creatures and possibly a new intelligent species which can create new forms of irrationality. "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

I will be 97 this month & am consumed with guilt for adding more individuals to an over-populated world.

Foxy: "If that is true - what new life will rise up to fill the niche that we currently occupy?"

The traditional six* Kingdoms of life: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria

The new kid on the block: Kingdom Non-Bio-Machina - ie, things that we typically call "man made machines". These are the next major step in evolution. (This is my personal take on the matter- traditionally biologists don't recognize this Kingdom as division of life)

Entities in Kingdom Machina are the fastest evolving forms on the planet. To give a comparison about how fast they are adapting/evolving consider the ability to see. Cell based biological machines (ie: traditional life-forms) took billions of years to develop sophisticated vision processing. In comparison non-biological machines required less than 10,000 years of evolution and now their sight is vastly superior to the most advanced vision of any biological species.

*: there are different categorizations of the world's biological species into Kingdoms. Some have less than six division's some have more. Many would argue that non-cellular evolving entities (like robots) wouldn't be classified as a Kingdom but a level up into a new Domain. Or even the next level (top level) up along side "Life Forms"- but this is a matter of philosophical debate, can a non-biological (esp: non-cellular) entity that reproduces by a process that consumerinh energy and material inputs and that adapts to its environment by an evolutionary mechanism be considered a life form?