There is no species whose disappearance has posed much of an inconvenience for civilization, not a single wild species that people couldn’t do without, fewer whose erasure would be noticed by any but a handful of die-hard conservationists or scientists.
There is no species whose disappearance has posed much of an inconvenience for civilization, not a single wild species that people couldn’t do without, fewer whose erasure would be noticed by any but a handful of die-hard conservationists or scientists. The irrelevance of wild things to civil society is why endangered species never make it into polls of top public priorities. I can’t name one wild species whose total disappearance would be materially felt by, essentially, anyone (you can easily function without having access to elephants, but if you misplace your phone for one whole day, it’s personal chaos). But I can effortlessly list various species from tigers to mosquitoes whose annihilation has been diligently pursued. Annihilation comes easy to Homo sapiens. What’s of little interest for us is coexistence.