13 Ways Humans Are Destroying Wildlife

Humans are Causing Loss of Nature and Ecosystems on Earth

Julie Smith, 5/4/26

This is a summary of Chapter 7, Death to Others, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

We humans are decimating wildlife on our planet.  And, it matters.  It matters big time.  It matters because we humans have evolved alongside said wildlife for millions of years, and if we trash the wildlife through our own stupidity, we’ll go down with them.  We can’t expect to exterminate 99.99% of all species, and be just fine on our own without them.  We need the wildlife more than they need us.  So, we might want to pay attention to what’s going on here, and knock it off.  Think about that.

              According to the World Wildlife Fund, we’ve managed to cause a 68% drop in the abundance of 20,811 monitored populations of 4,392 vertebrate species, which includes mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish) between 1970 and 2016.^6,7  Think about this.  That means we’ve taken down well over half the wildlife on our planet in less than 50 years.  Ironically, the first Earth Day was in 1970.  It seems like Earth Day hasn’t turned out to help the wildlife all that much, has it?  According to the 2020 Living Planet Report, we are threatening wildlife populations by “overusing the Earth’s biocapacity by at least 56%”.

Considering that we only make up 0.01% of the life on the planet, we sure have managed to create quite the global shit show, if you ask me.  As we’ve increased our livestock, we’ve displaced wildlife in the process.  We’ve also taken out about half the original native plants, and replaced them with our crops, buildings, roads, and pastures for grazing livestock. 

It's easy to forget about microbes, because they’re so tiny we can’t even see them without a microscope.  However, blowing them off completely may not be the greatest idea, because microbial biomass outnumbers the life that we can see by a long shot, which is telling and troubling.  This is because we know the least about the microbes, and how they impact entire ecosystems.  We don’t even fully understand the biomass that makes up a huge portion of our own bodies.  Hell, scientists didn’t even realize how much of our bodies is actually made up of microbes, or separate single-celled organisms, until the past few decades.  My point is, we don’t know as much as we might think, and to mess with the ecosystems of the entire planet by blithely eliminating all the wildlife is just asking for it.  Dontcha think?  When we have no idea how to even cure cancer, the most researched killer of humans on the planet?  Think about that.  Does that bother you?  It definitely makes me nervous.  Just saying.

Of the animals, the arthropods, which includes insects (you know, bugs), arachnids (spiders and such) and crustaceans (crabs, lobsters and the like), basically anything with an exoskeleton, makes up more than half the animal biomass, which means they play a fairly significant role in the intricate web of life that we barely understand.  This is pretty scary, because insects are among the hardest hit of our anthropogenic global wildlife destruction in the sixth mass extinction.

At this point, livestock is literally more than humans, specifically, 1.7 times as much livestock biomass as humans.  Which means we sure do eat a lotta meat, if you ask me.  Which is sad, since meat has a much higher carbon footprint to produce than vegetables, by far, and we consume far more beef than we need.  We can help wildlife a lot by reducing or eliminating meat and dairy in our diets.

At the end of the day, although humans make up only 0.01% of the total global biomass, we have contributed to an 83% decline in wild mammal biomass since pre-human times and a 50% decline in plant matter.  Obviously, we’re very efficient when it comes to exploiting species and trashing our environment.  We’ve managed to decimate wildlife for food or pleasure on virtually all the continents.  Look at us!   Go humans go!

Sadly, it turns out that I am personally just as responsible as anybody else for wildlife destruction and, yes, it’s with my mere existence.  Just by being born, I’m contributing to the loss of wildlife.  The second my tiny little head popped forth from my mother’s womb, I began taking up space and consuming resources just like any human inevitably does.  I may not be the worst, since I at least make an effort to minimize my carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, but I’m definitely complicit, whether I like it or not. Reducing our population is absolutely essential to saving wildlife.

Table 1 shows 13 ways that humans are destroying wildlife.

Table 1 - 13 Human impacts that are causing major reductions in wildlife

We are constantly taking land from wildlife as we continue to construct more homes and buildings to accommodate a growing population, and take ever more farm and ranch land to grow more food.  Once we occupy space, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for even the smallest insect to live there.  Let’s face it, what animal can survive being run over by mechanical farming equipment, or the lawnmowers, hedge trimmers and leaf blowers that take out insects, small animals, birds and nests in shrubs and yards?

It turns out that climate change is not the main cause of the decline of grassland species.  The primary cause is habitat loss, and the North American grasslands are one of the most at-risk habitats in the world. The American Bird Conservancy estimates that 51.3 million acres in the Northern Great Plains have been plowed under and replaced with cropland.  In 2018 and 2019 alone, nearly 600,000 acres of Northern Great Plains grasslands – an area almost the size of Yosemite National Park – were converted to fields of wheat, corn and soy.¹⁴  By the way, most of the corn is grown to feed cattle that we’re overconsuming.  By limiting or eliminating beef and dairy from our diets, we could return a huge portion of this cropland back to wildlife.  This is an example of a personal choice that any of us individual consumers can make on behalf of wildlife.

Industrial logging operations over the past several decades have taken out entire forest ecosystems, driving species to the brink of extinction in the process.  We can help wildlife by reducing single-use paper or avoiding it completely. Can you at least avoid paper towels? We haven't used those in more than 20 years.

Roads disrupt migratory routes, divide up ecosystems, and inhibit intermingling, confining entire species to ever-shrinking habitats and gene pools.  The furthest distance from a road in the U.S. lower 48 is just 22 miles, in Yellowstone National Park.²²  Think about that.  We don’t have much space anymore that isn’t fairly well carved out by roads, that chop up ecosystems for wildlife. 

The poisonous pesticides that we’re constantly applying to grow our food accumulate unregulated, and they don’t biodegrade because they are mostly synthetic petrochemicals.  These nasty chemicals kill pretty much all animal life in the applied areas and beyond, because they are dispersed into waterways and picked up by wildlife who dare to venture onto the treated land and naively consume any carcasses and barely surviving life forms that remain.  Since these toxins are known to kill wildlife at extremely low concentrations, parts per trillion in many cases, they cause extreme long lasting damage.  And, that’s just the pesticides.  It doesn’t include all the nutrients from fertilizers that run off our fields and farms, industrial pollutants, or all the products that we use in our homes for cleaning and for body care that we spew and run down the drain every single day.  We can help wildlife by avoiding poisons and products produced using poisons. This means only eating organic foods and using cleaning and personal care products with simple, natural, organic ingredients.

Global warming driven by our massive population and associated carbon emissions is pushing huge numbers of species to the brink of extinction, and they will probably be completely gone by the end of the century if we don’t reduce our numbers.  And maybe even if we do.  Many may not even last another decade.  It might be too late now, and the longer we wait, the lower any chance of mitigation will become.

Yet another consequence of global warming is the changing of the seasons that drive all wildlife behavior.  Think about that.  Essentially every biological process on the planet lives and dies by a clock.  The seasons drive everything from mating and egg-laying to birth, flowering, food availability, pollination schedules, and migrations.  This phenomenon is impacting almost all wildlife across the globe, in every ocean and on every continent.  Earlier warmth, delayed cold, and shifts in the frequency and strength of precipitation are changing established rhythms in unanticipated ways.³²

Many species have been driven to such low populations that recovery may not ultimately be possible, because of the loss of genetic diversity.  In a 2019 study, after the Florida panther population dropped to just 20 animals in the 1970’s, the decline in genetic diversity got so bad it was visible.³⁸  Animals were born with holes in their hearts, undescended testicles, kinked tails and other physical abnormalities.  And cougars aren’t the only species with genetic deformities. Inbreeding in bobcats, lizards and even a bird species are causing visible physical deformities.