"Nuke the Whales!"

Warstub wrote: If life is cyclic, in terms of renewal and replenishing, then i think there's no reason to believe that humans are solely to blame for much of the ecosystem issues that we face these days.

Life isn´t cyclic in that way and if we accept the numbers we are currently in the midst of a mass extinction that ranks up with the big 5 and we don´t have the impact of a 10km bolide to blame. If we look at the causes of extinction and rank them we end up with HIPPO, ranking them from the most important to the least important: Habitat destruction and fragmentation, Invasive species, Pollution, over-Population, Over-harvesting.
Habitat fragmentation and destruction is to a high degree produced by humans, by turning non-cultured land into cultured land. In the same way, Invasive species are more common due to direct exports by humans (rabbits in Australia one of the most famous cases) but also by accident through global travel. A species of bivalves split into two as the north Atlantic broke up dividing the ancestral stock. In modern days one was native to the shelf area of northern europe, the other in northern america. The larvae of both are planctonic. Tankers pump sea-water into their holds to maintain stability and release it when they take on cargo and such a tanker introduced the North American species to European waters in a Netherlands port - by now they have driven the European one to near extinction.

 

If life is cyclic, in terms of renewal and replenishing, then i think there's no reason to believe that humans are solely to blame for much of the ecosystem issues that we face these days. Pollution is unavoidable - even in the natural world. But if we don't manage our own pollution for our own sake, then we (most likely) are going to be less able to deal with any phase of renewal that might sweep the earth in the near future, whether it be from our own making or a part of the natural cycle of planet-wide life.