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"We are on a path to human extinction"

1979--what goes around comes around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late,_Great_Planet_Earth#/media/File:The_Late,_Great_Planet_Earth_cover.jpg

Mass Extinction

At the first Earth Day, its political sponsor, Senator Gaylord Nelson, warned: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

To put that in perspective, a 75% to 80% mass extinction is on the level of the cataclysm that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago—caused by the “environmental” catastrophe of a six-mile-wide meteor crashing into the Earth and cloaking it in an enormous cloud of ash and dust. Obviously, nothing remotely like that happened between 1970 and 1995.

There are still those who are peddling the notion that we’re in the process of the Sixth Great Extinction. So it didn’t happen back when they first said it would, but it’s going to happen soon, any day now

Some cold water was just thrown on this theory from an unexpected source: Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, writes:

Many now assume that we are in the midst of a human-caused “Sixth Mass Extinction” to rival the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But we’re not. The five historic mass extinctions eliminated 70 per cent or more of all species in a relatively short time. That is not going on now.
He points out that breathless statistics about the number of species being lost is largely driven by the extinction of already rare species that evolved in isolation and in small numbers on oceanic islands, and which did not survive the contact with the outside world and invasive species.

The island conservationist Josh Donlan estimates that islands, which are just 3 per cent of the Earth’s surface, have been the site of 95 per cent of all bird extinctions since 1600, 90 per cent of reptile extinctions, and 60 per cent of mammal extinctions. Those are horrifying numbers, but the losses are extremely local. They have no effect on the biodiversity and ecological health of the continents and oceans that make up 97 per cent of the Earth.
Moreover, much of this extinction has already occurred, since most of the world’s islands have already been explored and settled.

I suppose you can think of these as casualties of globalization, to be balanced against the many benefits of globalization. But they are not a threat to life on earth more broadly. It’s another reminder that statistics don’t always mean what they seem to mean, and that present trends do not always continue.