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Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

The "background" rate of extinction, i.e., pre-humans most of the time, is estimated at about 1-5 species per year. Currently, humans are causing 100 - 1000 times the background rate (10+ per day) [0, 1]. Do you feel that it is reasonable to allow any animal that isn't adapted to having its habitat destroyed by humans, go extinct?

In my opinion, given that these animals took millions of years to evolve, and if their threat of extinction is directly related to our activities, it seems reasonable, that as a progressive, intelligent species, we make efforts to preserve them for many worthwhile reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...

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So what if something took a million years to evolve? It doesn't follow that this long timeline ought to create any sense of obligation, moral or otherwise, by itself. We don't owe anything to non-sentient organisms.

It means its replacement would also take at least 1,000 years to evolve (depending on closest living ancestor).

Which is terrifying if you just knocked out a keystone of your ecosystem.

We are not foragers. We are not that dependant on natural ecosystems, which tend to be very robust anyway.

We don't owe anyone anything. I agree. But, no one owes anything to us either. If you think about it, we really aren't doing it for other species, are we? A few among us are being cautious to foresee something that could affect us.

Sure, we can call it save the planet and feel important but say if the ecology balance is broken down, food chains are broken up, its humans who get adversely affected, with perhaps lot of other species but there are going to be lots of species that will do just fine, some will perhaps even thrive. In other words, life goes on, without humans, no one cares.

Disclaimer: Few ideas borrowed generously from George Carlin's take on save the planet. Funny but wise, I think.

Sure. Nobody's arguing against responsible stewardship. What seems to rile people up is the idea that protecting the environment is an instrumental, not a terminal value, and that we can and should trade off environmental protection (here, endangered species) for other things that people find important.

Lots of people see environmental protection as a terminal value instead, and few things offend people more than proposals to trade off terminal values for instrumental ones.

that might be true, but what’s definitely true is that the environment is not winning... we regularly trade environment for industry, and rarely do the reverse. only recently have we decided that sustainable sources of electricity/industry are worthwhile, and still many times have to use economic arguments to justify it.

Even if you don't value the lives of animals, biodiversity is important to human survival.

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