I agree though, we should get out on some new space vessels soon to buy some insurance and project ourselves into the far future.
Surely we recognize that living things exist independent and outside of us without needing to lessen our own existence.
>Couldn't you make the analogous argument that the extinction of all life on Earth would be fine since it would have absolutely no effect on the vast majority of the universe?
I suppose you could but that's not what I said.
even leaving out monkeys and apes, i think other animals like for example racoons can make it to the "sapient" level with time if humans would "release" the space back to the Nature. And i think we have only very slightest idea about birds and insects. Cro-Magnon has been i'd say a version 0.7 of sapience with major bugs and broken&missing features, and i'd not be surprised if the Nature had other versions in the works.
If I was going to bet on non-human sapience, though, I'd go with crows. Intelligence seems to be most effective if you combine it with social instincts to create culture. Crows do this already.
In addition, our actions determine the fates of non-human species much more than their actions our fates.
However it's only a matter of time until something large collides with Earth and destroys it all.
Like it or not humans are the best chance this planet has to continue life on after a cataclysmic event by hopefully colonizing another planet.
Also recall that humans, as an invasive species, can be adept at destroying ecosystems. There's a big, interlocking series of forests in South America, for instance, that gets a lot of attention, but that's hardly the only example.
Humans mostly tend to radically reshape local ecosystems for their own ends, at times collapsing them.
Aside from some very local remediation successes here and there (which are more repair jobs than preservation), I'm unaware of any evidence that humans have "recognized, anticipated and averted" any of note.
Do you have any?
Farms are inherently unstable - the 'system' is missing. From an ecological perspective, they're no more an ecosystem than you'd get if you released a bunch of random animals in your house. You'd have a new 'system' that lasts until they die.
Scare quotes because I refuse to debase the word 'terrorism' by extending it to include property damage.
Edit: To put it mildly, the average Earth Firster has almost nothing politically in common with, e.g., the Christchurch shooter or the Unibomber.
Oh, you're a "social ecologist" aren't you?
There is nothing fascist or right-leaning in the notion that human activity largely has a negative impact on the natural world.
Humanity has an outsized impact on the world (natural and artificial). Our influence has impacted nearly all the ecological niches on earth. That said, assigning moral agency to me (or you) for that depends on a series of logical connections between ways of being and the human impact on the world.
We each choose (somewhat - hard to choose to be born in the first world) how we live, but individuals have limited agency for what "humanity" does as a whole. It's all well and good to say "humans bad" (and I don't totally disagree?), but that perspective has been out there for a while and humans are still doing the bad things. Seems like we should search for different approaches.