It's historical fact, unfortunately. The transition from the mesolithic to the neolithic resulted in not only the most radical deforestation and habitat destruction the world had ever before seen, but the creation of the paradigm for such destruction - what historians call the "neolithic package", a mobile set of behaviors and actions and technologies which were transported from the middle east to Asia and Europe and finally to the Americas. What were once vast, old growth wilderness forests with thousand year old trees forming vast cathederal canopies on every continent that we can't even conceive of, were transformed through clearcutting, burning, or even just gradual encroachment into raw open farmland and pasture to support the social hierarchies of massive wealth accumulation and slavery that are not as possible in hunter societies, where skill, intelligence, and cooperation are more crucial qualities than wealth measured in things like money or grain stores. The greatest trees of Europe were likely already gone by the time of Christ and Caesar, and certainly by the time of Charlemagne or soon thereafter, and, though it had already developed in mesoamerica, Columbus would transport the latest version of this putrescent mental/cultural/technological virus across the Atlantic, as would others across the Pacific until everyone everywhere was growing sugar cane, wheat, rice, corn, etc. in monocultural, single-species fields where tens of thousands of species had once interacted in complex ecosystems. And yes, animal domestication was and is a part of that macrocosmic version of AIDS but it was and is by no means the most significant or crucial foundation of it: that would be monocultural plant agriculture and the massive population numbers it makes possible with its empty carbohydrate slave-foods.
Of course all this is not to say that the trends toward organic agriculture and free range meat are not a step in a slightly better direction, but the underlying aspects of habitat destruction/substitution, deforestation, and the homo-superior mentalities, cultures and belief systems they engender remain. As for extinction events for our own species, the various agrarian feedback loops which simultaneously destroyed forest predators while feeding their contagion-carrying prey with grain producing fields and stores that resulted in plagues in antiquity and the middle ages were only brief pauses in the cancer and it has always rebounded aggressively. As sappy as it sounds, the best hope in what can only be a centuries-long repair comes from simple, voluntary things like family planning, getting women the right to vote in all countries so they can choose family planning, making higher education available free to anyone anywhere who wants it so they can understand all of the above, etc., things which the internet actually makes vaguely feasible on a global scale for the first time in human history. Of course that won't be allowed to happen though, and we will more likely spike to some Soylent-Green-style population level of like 50 billion, kill every animal species that we can't raise in factory meat processing plants, poison and despoil the oceans, the air, and all remaining wilderness, and just evolve into some slithering, hairless cannibalistic mutant that can live off its own filth.
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