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I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.
Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.
The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.
In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.
Ironically, the canonical example of a species the Romans ate to extinction is silphium, which people regularly complain about being extinct- because the Romans thought it was an effective birth control. Even if Roman medical knowledge was 100% accurate for once, how to prepare it as a contraceptive would almost certainly have been suppressed by Christianity(early Christian writers hated birth control, and it’s generally agreed that whatever efficacy silphium had it was as some sort of preparation).
But there you have it.
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We’ve got a bunch of more impactful recent extinctions than that.
A few that come to mind:
The passenger pigeon, whose flocks were so large they used to black out the sun for days on end as the billions of birds passed.
Stellars sea cow, the largest sirenian ever known to exist and the only which existed outside of warm tropical waters.
The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.
The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.
The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.
Of course there are a lot more which are not fully extinct but have been reduced so drastically it’s sort of similar.
The American buffalo. The right whale. Much of the range of the wolf, of bears, the general abundance and size of life in the ocean which has decreased over time, etc. etc.
There are native parrots on the Rio grande.
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These are due to species from "big land" getting on smaller lands and have very little to do with "ecosystem damage etc." it happens all the time when separated lands get connected
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But how are these impactful? What's the negative implication for humans from them being extinct?
Natural beauty is eroded, and the world is less interesting. No, these species did not make number go up, but that doesn't mean they meant nothing. What are the negative implication of humans living in a pod and not knowing what a tree is?
I guess I propose that they might mean close to nothing, when there's still 10 to 30 million other species that remain that easily fill the gap left.
I specifically chose species which don’t have others that easily fill the gap.
There aren’t birds that blot out the sky or native parrots or cold water manatee creatures in the US anymore, personally I think that’s something of value that disappeared.
We don’t miss them because of shifting baseline syndrome.
But for example, let’s say I’ve seen the manatees in Florida.. I have, they’re really beautiful. These huge gentle warm water mammals that just float up into the river systems and natural springs. You can be on a paddle board above a group of them and pet them, they just hang out underneath.
It would be sad if we lost these. Wouldn’t you agree?
Quite possible, btw
I find it hard to understand people’s attitudes towards nature sometimes. It’s typically, “sure we could lose that and we’d survive fine!”.
A lot of things could be lost and we’d survive ok. Just pick a dystopia from fiction. 1984, Brave New World, humans survive! We’re doing fine!
Should the response be then “who cares?”, or, are there other things in the world that matter than just human survival?
There a very big gap between an existence without manatees that a few people ever see on a recreational voyage, and living in a pod devoid of sunlight and subsisting on nutrient paste, or whatever other dystopia you might want to bring up.
And so because of that, we’re likely to keep reducing the web of life on the planet.
Yeah, it doesn’t affect you much if the manatee disappears. There may be some complicated knock on effect like more frequent algal blooms that make the beach a shitty place to be and affect the fishing industry. But we’re good at ignoring this type of thing.
Heck even if our cousins the chimpanzees (between 100k - 300k still exist in the wild), or the orangutan (~50,000 are left) disappeared, doesn’t really matter to you.
Ultimately it’s a spiritual principle. Either non human life on earth has value, or only human concerns do.
I have a foundational semi religious belief that the biota of the planet has innate value, so for example, if someone destroyed the rainforests of the planet tomorrow, even if through some magic this was made to have no impact on human wellbeing, I’d be forced to consider it unspeakably tragic.
Apparently not all humans share this belief.
I believe that to some degree. But you have to stack rank. At the end of the day, not everyone can survive, and we're all dead in the end anyway. So I consider human life far above most else.
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I think you're referring to silphium.
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