Mainly, we have taken what they all need to live, snipping the webworks of relation that make them possible. We cannot assess the world’s tens of millions of species individually. But we have a proxy: habitats. At global scale, all major habitat types except deserts are shrinking or degraded. Forests, despite gains in places such as the eastern United States, are at historic lows globally and continue falling and burning. Plows have claimed most grasslands.
