biodiversity == resilience. If we let the planet turn into a near-monoculture of kudzu and cockroaches (or whatever the stable equilibrium might look like), we die. If we wait to act until the web of relationships is simple enough that we can predict the particular nature of that death, it seems likely that it'll be too late.
This does seem like a doomed-to-fail stopgap kind of solution, but sometimes stopgaps are all you've got.