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.
The people in real power tend to be convinced that they’ve got where they are due to their own self-sufficient brilliance. We’re in general bad at recognizing our interdependence, but the kinds of narcissists and sociopaths who become billionaires are even worse at it than the rest of us. They don’t notice how they depend on other people, let alone other kinds of organisms and ecosystems. In their fantasies of self-sufficiency they’ll ride this out and be fine. The truth will come to them soon after it has hit the rest of us hard.