Humans are an evolutionary experiment in what a bigger brain can do.
So far it looks like the power of our ingenuity and ability to adapt our environment is running a close race with our ability to destroy and disrupt the living web that sustains us.
Our times have been portrayed as a contest between our intelligence and our stupidity.
But it is also a race between our compassion for all life and our short-sighted selfishness.
Compassion for the fellow life forms that sustain and accompany us on this planet causes the thoughtful among us great anguish when the best ecologists are warning of a mass extinction event that rivals the impact of a giant meteorite.
Extinctions are now running at 10 to 100 times their background level and scientists talk of an extinction debt.
Ecosystem disruptions, including climate change and ocean acidification, have made the extinction of many more life forms inevitable over time.
These disruptions include the shifting of predators and disease into new environments.
In New Zealand we will, for example, lose many more animal species without the massive sustained predator control operations that keep so many of our birds hanging on.
In the ocean, breeding of marine mammals and birds is well behind replacement rates and their food chain is impoverished by over-fishing. Many of our freshwater fish are sliding down the threatened scale towards critically endangered as waterways have been flooded with nutrients and sediment.
Plant diseases already here and on the horizon are now also threatening native species.
The variety of myrtle rust that has arrived is bad enough but a variant in Hawaii looks to be taking out their pohutukawa species.
Kauri die-back seems to be on the same trajectory that dutch elm disease took in the northern hemisphere.
It is all very well to say the Earth is resilient, that it has recovered before and it will recover again, but disruptions of this magnitude take millennia to play out and the current generation surely has no right to inflict such a protracted nightmare on future generations.
We should not be fooled by the china shop reserves and zoos where the last remaining members of a species are kept on display to remind children that their picture book characters are based on real creatures.
The only answer to the damage we are doing to the environment is to change our lifestyles radically before our one species short-term aspirations hit the brick wall of environmental degradation that finally stops the flow of free services from nature.