We'd all seen it coming for decades - seen what would happen to the world if we'd go on like this. And yet we still did. By the mid-twentieth century, biodiversity was decimated. And yet, this still wasn't enough. Many scientists endeavoured to diminish or even reverse our impact on environment, of course, but rarely did they receive very much support - at least, rarely did they receive the support they deserved, reckoning the magnitude of what was happening. Because it all came so gradually, it took a while before drastic measures were taken. This happened when the calamity finally became life-threatening not only to other species but also to man himself.
The biosphere is like a body and we are a single tissue dependent on it. If the rest of the body fails, we fail. We are not the disease, but the vector of the disease. Humankind was like a tumor destroying its host and so ultimately destroying itself. And all of the machinery they had by then thought up could not suffice to replace the complex machinery of the biosphere. What nature had created in billions of years, we could not recreate in a matter of years. It was then that the government of the world powers finally flinched and really became aware that what was happening to the biosphere was probably more important than all the futilities they were debating for years and years on end without getting anywhere. By then the global cataclysm that had been wrecking the world for over a century, and they'd known it all that time. But in their selfishness, only when the western world itself was threatened with famine, they took serious measures, rather than treating it as a low-priority matter which could wait for others. Much more could have been done about it. But they just postponed it.
Through the mouth of his famous character Prince Myshkin, "The Idiot," Dostoevsky famously said that "Beauty will save the world." Indeed, beauty is the seed of enlightenment, and enlightenment would be the salvation of the world. But now, beauty itself had to be saved. For as nature wasted away, her beauty dwindled. Humanity became so detached from beauty that they no longer knew of its existence. Decadence replaced the value of beauty, for in their consumption society it was all they had, all that could offer them refuge from the emptiness of their lives. The beauty of nature became something distant, something almost legendary. Many of the creatures that had one flourished on the Earth became myths, incredible, almost implausible in their fantasticality - the tiger, for instance, seemed to belong in fairy tales, and some of the most benighted even believe they actually were a mere concoction of human fancy. In truth, the tiger still lived in some reserves, but in such small numbers that almost none were allowed to see them with their own eyes, or even enter the reserves. Unfortunately, these did not last long either because of inbreeding.
But all the time that the ecosphere exponentially shrunk, the noosphere exponentially grew. And in the end, its beauty would save the world. The modern human from the Transition was fascinated by knowledge, the brilliance and resplendence of it. And although few people had witnessed the beauty of nature, they all knew it, albeit only through media. They knew it inside out, literally. Many were fascinated by its complexity - its diversity, its composition, its biochemistry… In the end, it was the beauty of this knowledge, or the knowledge of this beauty, that would save the world.
Yet halfway the twenty-first century, the majority of all species, plants and animals alike, were either extinct or threatened with extinction. The number of specimens remaining was more stable, with all the cattle and fowl and other domesticated animals, but those excluded, only a fraction remained. This was not the most dramatic result as most species could recover: in the Permian-Triassic extinction event almost all specimens died yet 25% of all species survived. Dramatically, the number of species killed wasn't very much lower than it was then, as most had perished since the early twentieth century.
Not quite, however. Though it took some time for civilization to turn its sluggish head around the notion of actually doing something to set its own actions straight, it eventually did. The first drastic measure taken to save the world and its flora and fauna was to suspend extinct species.
That is, their eggs were cryopreserved until the world would become hospitable enough to support them, a state known as (specific) hibernation. These eggs were stored in arks for many years before they were either hatched or grown. In the latter case, things got complicated as the specimen's embryogenesis required apparatuses known as arteruses or artificial uteruses. In vitro insemination was usually impossible because the species had long died and there was therefore no mother to carry the egg - although the gametes were also stored separately (before amphimixis) for this purpose.
