Is animal extinction really the end of the world?

‘Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which our children will never see’, says Pope Francis in his gloomy encyclicalLaudato si. Can this possibly be true? Over the past 500 years, 1.3 per cent of birds and mammals are known to have become extinct — 200 species out of 15,000. There are far, far more species of invertebrates and plants in existence of course. The latest ‘predicted number’ of species is 8.7 million, of which 7.7 million are animals. (The remaining million are plants, fungi and microbes.) If you assume — which the great Matt Ridley assures me is unlikely — that an equally high percentage of these has become extinct, it averages out at about 350 a year. The loss of any species feels very sad — though, if Ridley is right, this has much more to do with (non-human) invasive species than climate change — but surely, at this rate, it is not the end of the world.