Life on Earth is disappearing, quite simply, because we're f*cking it up. How's that for a colorful quote?! Life is disappearing because on an individual level, we use a vast amount of resources and the human population has just been growing like crazy for the last 500 years. When you multiply lots of resource use by lots of people, you get a big problem in terms of the depletion of resources, pollution and global warming.
It's important that we maintain biodiversity for a couple reasons. One is the ethical reason - What right do we have to destroy the rest of the world? The other is a self-interested reason - biodiversity works for us.
A lot of medicines are made from wild plants, so when you destroy the tropical rainforests, you're destroying medicines that could be curing your cancer or saving your baby. That's just one example. If you take one species out, the whole system can collapse. It's not a question of which species matter; they all matter.
The Red List of Endangered Species came about because people, and scientists in particular, began to realize that animals were being threatened. The list was a means of giving the rest of the world the status of the wild animals and plants of the world in one centralized, compelling message.
The fact there are more and more species on this list every year is partly because our knowledge is increasing. We're finding new species all the time and getting new data about species in trouble. The other part of it is just that we're increasingly wiping species out because our rapacious use of the natural world is accelerating and more species will become extinct as a result.
Extinct means zero left.
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