If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...