> I'm not sure how you could interpret it like that.
Honestly this is how it reads to me.
Real science is complicated. It is very often -- maybe even most times -- the case that researchers can observe something happening, identify it, but not know what is the proximate cause.
Then, if they can identify the direct cause, that leads to the next problem: what caused that, building a chain of links, until they can say "we think it is this that is the root issue".
It is normal natural scientific caution to say "we don't know what causes this."
But it's an over-simplification. We do know what the ultimate cause is: human induced changes to the environment.
It is possible to both say "we don't know the reason" and to also know the root reason and for both statements to be correct.
Around the world, wildlife is dying off in large numbers. Even when it is not directly humans intentionally killing the organisms, it is caused by environmental damage caused by humans.
Saying it's not is like standing over a bleeding body, gloating, with blood-covered hands, and saying "I didn't kill him! The knife did!"
Yes, honey bee colonies are collapsing and the direct proximal cause is unidentified. However, that is a small facet of general large-scale collapse in insects in general: 85-90% in the last century.
That in turn is a big important faced of a general collapse in wild animals over that time, and indeed, over the last 2-2½ centuries.
The death of most wild animals is only a part of the death of countless plants, fungi, invertebrates, and microbes of various kinds.
You can't pin that down to a single cause, such as, say, DDT. There are lots of causes. But one thing caused all of them: human technological civilisation.
Before the Industrial Revolution, humans had already driven lots of species into extinction. Steller's Sea Cow, the Great Auk, the Dodo, all in documented history. Before historically recorded times, giant land sloths in South America, elephant birds and moas in New Zealand, and lots more.
But it's been exponentially increasing for about ¼ of a millennium, and the thing about exponenntial curves is that close to the end, where the rise is nearly vertical, all hell breaks loose and it becomes hard to trace the connections between phenomena and changes that are occurring very rapidly.
Even so, the root cause is clear.
It's humans.