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Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around? It might be nice to have Sumatran rhinos around so you could see something new and cool, but there are hundreds of thousands of cool species to see. I would guess that the Sumatran rhino does not hold a crucial position in any ecosystem. It's certainly not the same to us as having people die out because of smallpox etc. People mean much more to us than animals. If we have the money, the means, and the time to preserve the Sumatran rhino, then let's save it. If we have better things to do, let's do that instead.

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I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving. Reasonable even if a little cold.

I tend to take the view that life — all life — is extremely rare in the universe, and that alone is enough to warrant as much action as realistically possible to preserve it. A species might never be useful for anything, but it is the unique product of countless generations before it; a story of complexity and beauty that, it could be argued, dwarfs any of humanity’s greatest achievements.

>I guess if you try to quantify a species’ value by looking at its utility, either to the ecosystem or for our amusement, you may arrive at the conclusion that some species are not worth saving.

If you included our own species in that evaluation you may reasonably conclude that ours is not worth saving, above all others.

What would one reasonably label a species that hyper-populates, spreads itself spatially, destroys the other species and their habitations in the spaces it expands to, consumes at a rate far above utility, hordes whatever resources it can gather and spends its efforts calculating how to increase these efforts?

Unless the intelligence we evolved with is used to benefit the rest of life which flourished with our own, then it is hard to call it a virtue, or even deem us any more worthwhile, or worth preserving, more than any other life form.

Unless all species naturally end up at that stage and the only way to the next stage of evolution is to rise above it.

Or if every animal life is net more pain than enjoyment.

Or if it's the only way to have any lifeform exist into perpetuity. Then we're net beneficial to all other life on the planet as long as any of it survives along with us; disregarding that we're perpetuating a boatload of genes just by continuing to exist.

Any individual animal has a survival instinct. We have a survival instinct that encompasses much larger groups than that of any animal.

It’s a survival instinct when there’s two mouths to feed, and one meal to do it.

When there’s enough for everyone and more, and we take enough resources for 50 because then we get it faster, cheaper, and shinier... well, I wouldn’t personally describe that as survival instinct.

There are some days I definitely don’t disagree with you. For all our intelligence, we spend an awful lot of it being senselessly destructive. Hard to argue that’s worth keeping around.

This is fair. I would say though that I am not suggesting that "species are not worth saving". Rather I would define my view as "all species are worth saving, but as human actors, and not gods, we need to pick and choose".

Again, I would love to see nothing go extinct. Only reason I left my first comment is that I think it is unfair to classify the extinction of species during our lifetimes as "meekly accept[ing]" as opposed to "sad but rational given our limitations".

I hear you, and FWIW, I didn’t construe your meaning negatively.

I am Malaysian. I wish I could say that despite our best conservation efforts, we just couldn’t save the Sumatran rhino. Instead, both within Malaysia and without, we hardly give even a moment’s thought to the damage we do as we do it.

If only our quandary was, “which species won’t we be able to save?” instead of “what species are we going to sacrifice so we don’t have to change our lifestyle?”

> Ok, but why do we need to do anything to keep certain animal species around?

For the same reason the Internet Archive is worth keeping: Sumatran Rhinos (and all other species) contain irreplaceable information accumulated over millions of years of evolution. You never know when or how some of that information might turn out to be useful. But once the last backup is gone, it's gone forever.

Unlikely, but possible, so fair. Again though, not really comparable (for us) to human loss. And I'm fine sacrificing "you never know" if we end up using that time and effort for something more pressing, as alluded to by BurningFrog below.

If you take on the perspective of holding the world as temporary ward, preserving it for the use and pleasure of future generations, then that easily dismissed single person missing experiencing something becomes an uncountable number of humans no longer able to do so. While there is certainly a balance to be struck between using our resources for our current needs or amusements and using them to safeguard the needs and amusements of those to come after, your perspective of dismissing it out of hand veers far too much to the side of disregarding those that will come after us entirely.

It's an act of extraordinary hubris to view the global ecosystem through the lens of human entertainment. If there is one lesson we should learn from the last 100 years it's that our species understands very little about the complexity and healthy functioning of ecosystem upon which we depend.

"You never know" is an argument usually applied selectively. It has the advantage that it is always true.

Yeah, we don't know what terrible unforeseen consequence letting this species go will have.

But we don't know what good consequence it might have either.

We can make some pretty good guesses. We make this kind of judgement call about species all the time. Like it or not, we pick the winners and losers in this world. That's why there are lots of dogs, cows, and chickens, and no smallpox viruses (at least not in the wild). It's because we've decided that dogs, cows and chickens deserve to live because they make our lives better, and smallpox viruses don't deserve to live because they make our lives worse.

It seems to me that a Sumatran Rhino is a lot more like a dog or a cow or a chicken than it is like a smallpox virus. It's true that we can't eat them or keep them as pets, but just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.

> just the ability to go see one in the wild has value IMHO.

Two thoughts:

1. A common mistake is to think that just because something has value, it's good to do. This reasoning ignores cost! Only by comparing cost and benefits can we make informed choices.

2. This value is specific to you. Others assign less or more value for this.

True. But...

3. Causing a species to go extinct eliminates all possibility of anyone extracting any value from it now or in the future. That has an unknown and potentially enormous cost in the long run.

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