"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
The cartoon is accurate. Generally I feel the modern conservation movement is an exercise in abject futility and is doomed to fail. In a way it might be better to allow things to collapse (we're doing a great job, actually) so that the Earth can get on with replenishing biodiversity all on its own. Whether or not we're a part of that future is inconsequential. After each of the five great extinctions it took only 5 to 10 million years for natural processes of biological evolution to restore biodiversity.
Being generous, Homo Sapiens has been around for a few hundred thousand years, the Homo genus going back about 2 million years — that's .04% of the Earth's 4.5 billion year age. It's not even a blink of an eye in terms of deep time. The fossil record shows that microscopic organisms going back about 3.7 billion years, but abiogenesis will not need another billion years to kickstart things. Do our worst, life — in a myriad forms — will endure. I find that thought rather comforting.
While we're on the subject, there's a confusion of concepts I often come across in creationist circles:
1. Origin of the Universe.
2. Origin of Earth.
3. Abiogenesis.
4. Biological Evolution.
From the Book of Genesis:
And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky. So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.
Well, not exactly ...
Universe: I'll define the observable Universe as the collection of hundreds of billions of galaxies that we can detect from our little spec in the enormity of the Cosmos. Whether there are more "galactic containers" (multiverse) is not known — but we do know there's at least one. The best explanation for the origin of the Universe is Big Bang Cosmology: the scientific theory that describes how the Universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature, and it's still expanding. For billions of years there was a Universe and no such thing as planet Earth.
Earth: Our Solar System formed about 4.5 billion years from a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust — a veritable nebula. Gravitational forces collapsed material on itself and began to spin, forming a star (our sun). Matter further out in the nebula formed spherical clumps that eventually became planets orbiting the sun, the third being Earth. Did you know that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in all life on Earth, can be found on asteroids?
Abiogenesis (not to be confused with Evolution): A primordial soup slowly develops with ingredients for pre-life chemical reactions. It's hypothesized — exact conditions not presently known — there was a transition from non-living organic compounds to self-complexifying ones; a prebiotic synthesis of organic molecules, molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. This is abiogenesis. There was a winnowing Darwinian-like process at work, but these steps from non-life to life should not be confused with biological evolution. From the origin of the solar system to the first single-celled fossilized lifeforms was around 1 billion years.
Evolution (not to be confused with Abiogenesis): The first multicellular organisms do not appear in the fossil record until about 600 million years ago. In other words, self-replicating single-celled lifeforms were the only living things on Earth for over 2 billion years. Around 540 million years ago there was an unparalleled emergence of organisms at the beginning of the Cambrian Period where the major phyla that make up nearly all modern animal life appear in the fossil record. This didn't happen in a day, or a week, or decades, but over the course of millions of years. Ultimately there would be sharks, turtles, panthers, elephants, dolphins, centipedes, tiger beetles, crows, crayfish, toads, salamanders, badgers, skunks, rats, crocodiles, baboons, and us.
We cannot destroy Nature's ability to replenish Earth's life, but we can destroy ourselves and take a lot of other critters with us in the process. Earth will eventually recover and life will endure — entirely new species will evolve. It will do so until the sun's demise, rendering Earth utterly inhospitable to any kind of life as we know it. The sun still has enough energy to power life for several billion years. Keep in mind that amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) are out there in the Cosmos and planets likely number in the trillions. Thus, it's highly likely there is life on some of them.
Anyway, the entertaining part of this remedial science comes about whenever a creationist states: "I don't believe in evolution — I don't believe life can just spring out of mud and water!" Therein lies the confusion and a logical fallacy (or two), mixing up abiogenesis with evolution — the former is the origin of life from non-life, and the latter is what happens once there is life and a self-replicating system with natural selection acting as a winnowing process that fuels speciation over time. The logical fallacy is the argument from personal incredulity, which asserts something must be false because it defies a particular theistic belief or is difficult to imagine. But part of this difficulty is not knowing how natural processes work, so it's also a type of argument from ignorance.
I don't believe that life can just spring out of mud and water either, if that's all that's in it, and if we're only talking about a couple of minutes, months, or few years. But given millions or billions of years it wouldn't surprise me in the least if a variety of constituent organic building blocks renders self-complexifying/replicating biological systems that can function as living entities. Once you have a solid but imperfect copying process, a winnowing force of natural selection is automatic. I also don't believe that a badger and kangaroo can mate and give birth to a koala, which is how farcical creationist arguments can be.