Actually I would argue that we are, by a long shot. Sure you can say, what about asteroids/volcanoes that caused bottlenecks -- but that was a very different situation. There have been times when c.95% of species were destroyed, but those times were actually good for diversity and evolution. The bottom line is that, yes, nature is "adapting," but not in a healthy way. There's a term in biology called the filtering effect, the essence of which is that nature has adapted by deleting species -- our presence has forced tenuous (and not so tenuous) species to extinction and filtered all but the most adaptable (to us!) species. But no astonishing outburst of evolutionary creativity will follow. Anyway, I don't like Noam Chomsky so I'm probably not gonna bother reading this, and thanks for convincing me of that. But mass extinction horrifies me more than almost every other world problem combined, so it's perhaps not to be dismissed lightly. We'll survive it, in the short term, but in the long run it's incredibly bad for homo sapiens. [Also - "Rising seas can be held back with walls (see: Netherlands, New Orleans)" - this is only partially true in a handful of places and will not at all be a viable solution in regard to predicted sea level increases in 100-200 years.] EDIT: I read the article, because why not, and it was not what I was expecting. Much shorter and more vapid.Nature will adapt as it always has and rise from its ashes - humanity is far from the greatest threat life has overcome.