No. Genocide is right. Once civilization collapses, there will be no way to keep all the spent fuel rods in all the nuclear power plants cool, so there will be nuclear accidents all over the world, spewing poison and death for millennia. Few species will survive the havoc we have wrought. And, we're doing it willingly and knowingly at this point.
You'd be surprised at how persistent and tough life can be.
Look at the animals and plants that have colonized the still highly radioactive area around Chernobyl. Evidently, humans are more of a challenge to most wildlife than toxic levels of radiation. And some humans still live there too, ignoring the warnings.
This doesn't mean some parts of the planet won't become uninhabitable for us, or at least incapable of sustaining civilization because of intense heat and lack of water.
I agree that this will be bad for our civilization as a whole, and life after its collapse will pretty much suck. People forget how interdependent we are, how much we depend on a global economy for the resources we need to maintain infrastructure and our high tech tools and toys. And we've plucked the low hanging fruit when it comes to energy and raw materials, so civilization may not get another chance.
The outraged behavior of so many in the face of modern civilization's greatest accomplishment (the radical notion that all people have rights and value and that humans shouldn't own one another) doesn't bode well for most of humanity if we end up permanently back in some kind of middle ages.
Of course, the people who still have the knowledge of how to live in low density situations as hunter gatherers may have the edge in the decades and centuries after a collapse of civilization.
