It’s not obvious, but much of the exploration and exploitation of the environment had to do with finding new sources of energy; the new world was prized as much for its sources of biofuel as anytihng else; the whaling era that gave us such great folk songs while scouring the world to rid us of one of nature’s greatest animal resources - that wa all about fuel oil.
Even simple tasks - before automation and indutry, the cost was prohibitive. When every brick had to be fired by wood (or if you’re lucky, coal) brought by cart from miles away, even brick buildings were expensive.
In this day when we hop into a ton or two of steel and zip along what would be 2 days’ walking for a loaf of bread, we forget how constrained society was before cheap energy. To simply grind wheat for bread took a significant amount of labour, which is why water wheels for milling (or wind mills) were useful. Before coal was common for steel-making, whole areas of New Jersey woods were denuded of trees to make steel; meaning steel plants moved every decade or less.
Steam engines came along because coal-fired steam engines were a reliable replacement for those river-base water wheels, and could be scaled up easily. As the surface coal was used up, deeper coal required steam engines just to pump the water out of those mines - one of the impetus for developing efficient steam engines.
Oil, or liquid fuel, is just a very convenient method of storing and using energy. We got a long way with coal before 1900, but oil was just so much easier to handle. Would we have gotten anywhere without fossil fuels? Maybe; but I suspect the scale of industry would have been much much less, and so the evolution of science and technology slower. Metal was avialable before coal age, but not in easy quantities. How cheap and available does metal have to be before people find out about electrical properties? Then electronics? How chep and easy does energy have to be to discover advanced ceramics? If forests were the major source of fuel, at what point does population control become a serious issue?
As for extinction events - when whole swaths of the ecology are wiped out, it presents opportunities. Darwin’s finches, for example, evolved into different species to take advantage of food that was there for teh taking - because in a pristine fresh environment recently emerged from the sea, nothing else was already eating that food. The birds best suited to eat insects would enjoy a real advantage because they were not competing with anything already suited to that task. Over time they because suited enough to out-compete any new-comers, but to get their beak in the door, so to speak, the best advantage was no established competition.
That’s the advantage. If the environment changes - the quicker the better - then an unoccupied ecological niche - food, predation or cover, etc. - may present an opportunity for the better but maybe not perfect candidate. Natural selection may then help that candidate become even better suited. Without that, a candiate for a niche - insect eater, grazer, whatever - must be sufficiently better adapted to displace an animal already suited for that role. So ecological upheaval results in sudden jumps in evolution and rapid change. the status quo just stays relatively static.