I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.

I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.

All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

That was a pointless source. Which 23 categories? How do I know if I care about them?

Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03200-4

This doesn't mean we shouldn't make every effort to re-wild places. It'll slow or even prevent the loss of at-risk species and introduce resilience to ecosystems against the onslaught of climate change.

I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.

I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.

Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.

We are in the 6th mass extinction event. Want to feel bad? Look at the numbers of decline in the last 40 years, it's dramatic. Even in my lifetime it's been dramatic.

Did stream restoration for a few years and the thing that stuck with me is you can put the habitat back and the species still don't return. Some of them just have nowhere left to come from.