The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.
For me, one of the most poignant things of recent years was seeing all the news stories during the COVID lockdown of how quickly nature started to bounce back without any humans around, and then just watching it instantly vanish again and it seems like hardly anyone even remembers it now. We certainly learned nothing from it, and IMO it does make it a bit difficult to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that nature is probably a lot better off without us in it.