> More to the point, 99.9 species that ever existed are now extinct.
> Extinction is a law of nature.
There's nothing natural about species extinctions nowadays. The rainforests, which contain probably the most biodiversity per square meter on the planet, are being trashed because of market forces run amok, which force countries like Brazil into slash-and-burn extractivism to make the payments on their unpayable foreign debt. Preserving species isn't an absolute, of course; noone would want to preserve the smallpox virus, a horrid life-form. But we're talking about the unnecessary destruction of countless natural histories, of life-forms we don't know very much about, who haven't done us any harm, and are the contingent, irreplaceable product of millions of years of evolution. By preserving them, we're doing more than just preserving ourselves; we're also allowing those life-forms to have a future, to evolve into other, perhaps more interesting species.
-- Dennis